Saturday (9 page)

61 Ian McEwan

'pigeon feeder' is a term synonymous with mentally deficient. Behind the throng round the cart is a bunch of kids in leather jackets and cropped hair, looking on with tolerant smiles. They have already unfurled their banner which proclaims simply, Peace not Slogans!!

The scene has an air of innocence and English dottiness. Perowne, dressed for combat on court, imagines himself as f

Saddam, surveying the crowd with satisfaction from some Baghdad ministry balcony: the good-hearted electorates of the Western democracies will never allow their governments to attack his country. But he's wrong. The one thing Perowne thinks lie knows about this war is that it's going to happen. With or without the UN. The troops are in place, they'll have to fight. Ever since he treated an Iraqi Professor of Ancient History for an aneurysm, saw his torture scars and listened to his stories, Perowne has had ambivalent or confused and shifting ideas about this coming invasion. Miri Taleb is in his late sixties, a man of slight, almost girlish build, with a nervous laugh, a whinnying giggle that could have something to do with his time in prison. He did his Ph.D. at University College London and speaks excellent English. His field is Sumerian civilisation, and for more than twenty years he taught at the university in Baghdad and was involved in various archaeological surveys in the Euphrates area. His arrest came one winter's afternoon in 1994, outside a lecture room where he was about to teach. His students were waiting for him inside and did not see what happened. Three men showed their security accreditation, and asked him to go with them to their car. There they handcuffed him, and it was at that point that his torture began. The cuffs were so tight that for sixteen hours, until they were removed, he could think of nothing else but the pain. Permanent damage was done to both shoulders. For the following ten months he was moved around central Iraq between various jails. He had no idea what these moves meant, and no means of letting his wife know he

62 Saturday

was still alive. Even on the day of his release, he didn't discover what the charges were against him.

Perowne listened in his office to the professor, and later talked to him in the ward after his operation - fortunately, a complete success. For a man approaching his seventieth birthday, Taleb has an unusual appearance - a childlike smooth skin and long eyelashes, and a carefully groomed black moustache - surely dyed. In Iraq he had no involvement or interest in politics, and declined to join the Ba'ath Party. That may have been the cause of his problems. Equally, it ronlrl have been the fart that one of his wife's cousins,, lone dead, was once a member of the Communist Party, or that another cousin had received a letter from Iran from a friend exiled because of his supposed Iranian descent; or that the husband of a niece had refused to return from a teaching job in Canada. Another possible reason was that the professor himself had travelled to Turkey to advise on archaeological digs. He was not particularly surprised by his arrest, and nor would his wife have been. They both knew, everyone knew, someone who'd been taken in, held for a while, tortured perhaps, and then released. People suddenly turned up at work again, and did not speak about their experiences, and no one dared ask - there were too many informers around, and inappropriate curiosity could get you arrested. Some came back in sealed coffins - it was strictly forbidden to open them. It was common to hear of friends and acquaintances making the rounds of the hospitals, police stations and government offices hoping for news of their relatives.

Miri spent his time in stinking, unventilated cells - six feet by ten with twenty-five men crammed inside. And who were these men? The professor giggled mirthlessly. Not the expected combination of common criminals mixed in with intellectuals. They were mostly very ordinary people, held for not showing a car licence plate, or because they got into an argument with a man who turned out to be a Party official,

63

Ian McEwan

or because their children were coaxed at school into reporting their parents' unappreciative remarks at the dinner table about Saddam. Or because they refused to join the Party during one of the many recruitment drives. Another common crime was to have a family member accused of deserting from the army

Also in the cells were security officers and policemen. The various security services existed in a state of nervous competition with each other, and agents had to work harder and harder to show how diligent they were. Whole branches of security could come under suspicion. The torture was routine - Miri and his companions heard the screaming from their cells, and waited to be called. Beatings, electrocution, anal rape, near-drowning, thrashing the soles of the feet. Everyone, from top officials to street sweepers, lived in a state of anxiety, constant fear. Henry saw the scars on Taleb's buttocks and thighs where he was beaten with what he thought was a branch of some kind of thorn bush. The men who beat him did so without hatred, only routine vigour they were scared of their supervisor. And that man was frightened for his position, or his future liberty, because of an escape the year before.

'Everyone hates it/ Taleb told Perowne. 'You see, it's only terror that holds the nation together, the whole system runs on fear, and no one knows how to stop it. Now the Americans are coming, perhaps for bad reasons. But Saddam and the Ba'athists will go. And then, my doctor friend, I will buy you a meal in a good Iraqi restaurant in London.'

The teenage couple head off across the square. Resigned to, or eager for, whatever she's walking towards, she lets the boy put his arm around her shoulder and her head lolls against him. She's still digging away with a free hand, along her waistband and into the small of her back. That girl should be wearing a coat. Even from here he can see the pink trails made by her scratching. A tyrannical fashion compels her to bare her umbilicus, her midriff, to the February

64

I Saturday

chill. The pruritus suggests that her tolerance of heroin is not yet well developed. She's new on the job. What she needs is an opioid antagonist like naloxone to reverse the effect. Henry has left the bedroom and has paused at the head of the stairs, facing the nineteenth-century French chandelier that hangs from the high ceiling, and wonders about going after her with a prescription; he is, after all, dressed for running. But she also needs a boyfriend who isn't a pusher. And a new life. He starts down the stairs, while above him the chandelier's glass pendants tinkle and chime !o the vibrations of the Victoria line tube train far beneath the house slowing into Warren Street station. It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fates, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance that cause one young woman in Paris to be packing her weekend bag with the bound proof of her first volume of poems before catching the train to a welcoming home in London, and another young woman of the same age to be led away by a wheedling boy to a moment's chemical bliss that will bind her as tightly to her misery as an opiate to its mu receptors.

The quality of silence in the house is thickened, Perowne can't help unscientifically thinking, by the fact of Theo deeply asleep on the third floor, face-down under the duvet of his double bed. Some oblivious hours lie ahead of him yet. When he wakes he'll listen to music fed through his hi-fi via the internet, he'll shower, and talk on the phone. Hunger won't drive him from his room until the early afternoon when he'll come down to the kitchen and make it his own, placing more calls, playing CDs, drinking a pint or two of juice and messily concocting a salad or a bowl of yoghurt, dates, honey, fruit and chopped nuts. This fare seems to Henry to be at odds with the blues.

Arriving on the first floor, he pauses outside the library, the most imposing room in the house, momentarily drawn

65 Ian McEwan

by the way sunshine, filtering through the tall gauzy oatmeal drapes, washes the room in a serious, brown and bookish light. The collection was put together by Marianne. Henry never imagined he would end up living in the sort of house that had a library. It's an ambition of his to spend whole weekends in there, stretched out on one of the Knole sofas, pot of coffee at his side, reading some world-rank muster piece or other, perhaps in translation. He has no particular book in mind. He thinks it would be no bad thing to understand what's meant, what Daisy means, by literary genius. Ik''--; ?v>! :;;;-;. ho'5 cvor ... \j-iru_':i;x J il <.;t iiibl hand, clo^piu various aUempis. He even half doubts its existence. But his free time is always fragmented, not only by errands and family obligations and sports, but by the restlessness that comes with these weekly islands of freedom. He doesn't want to spend his days off lying, or even sitting, down. Nor does he really want to be a spectator of other lives, of imaginary lives - even though these past hours he's put in an unusual number of minutes gazing from the bedroom window. And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. The times are strange enough. Why make things up? He doesn't seem to have the dedication to read many books all the way through. Only at work is he single-minded; at leisure, he's too impatient. He's surprised by what people say they achieve in their spare time, putting in four or five hours a day in front of the TV to keep the national averages up. During a lull in a procedure last week - the micro-doppler failed and a replacement had to come from another theatre - Jay Strauss stood up from the monitors and dials of his anaesthetic machine and, stretching his arms and yawning, said he was awake in the small hours, finishing an eight hundred-page novel by some new American prodigy. Perowne was impressed, and bothered - did he himself simply lack seriousness?

In fact, under Daisy's direction, Henry has read the whole of Anna Karen ina and Madame Bovary, two acknowledged

66 Saturday

masterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. Tlte^e books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation.

They had the virtue, at least, of representing a recognisable physical reality, which could not be said for the so-called magical realists she opted to study in her final year. What were these authors of reputation doing - grown men and women of the twentieth century - granting supernatural powers to their characters? He never made it all the way through a single one of those irksome confections. And written for adults, not children. In more than one, heroes and heroines were born with or sprouted wings - a symbol, in Daisy's term, of their liminality; naturally, learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration. Others were granted a magical sense of smell, or tumbled unharmed out of highflying aircraft. One visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him.

A man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain - consciousness, no less. It isn't an article of faith with him, he knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs. If that's worthy of awe, it also deserves curiosity; the actual, not the magical, should be the challenge. This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish

67 1

* Ian McEwan I

evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible. *j

'No more magic midget drummers/ he pleaded with her ||

by post, after setting out his tirade. 'Please, no more ghosts, !|

angels, satans or metamorphoses. When anything can |{

happen, nothing much matters. It's all kitsch to me.' |!

'You ninny/ she reproved him on a postcard, 'you fi

Gradgrind. It's literature, not physics!' |i

They had never conducted one of their frequent arguments 11

by post before. He wrote back: 'Tell that to your Flaubert and |j

]<>!v!'.>v. v\oi .! single winged iuiin-.-tn SvUveen them''

She replied by return of post, 'Look at your Mme Bovary again' - there followed a set of page references. 'He was f

warning the world against people just like you,' - last three words heavily underscored.

So far, Daisy's reading lists have persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling and hit-and-miss to inspire uncomplicated wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved. Perhaps only music has such purity. Above all others he admires Bach, especially the keyboard music; yesterday he listened to two Partitas in the theatre while working on Andrea's astrocytoma. And then there are the usual suspects - Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. His jazz idols, Evans, Davis, Coltrane. Cezanne, among various painters, certain cathedrals Henry has visited on holidays. Beyond the arts, his list of sublime achievement would include Einstein's General Theory, whose mathematics he briefly grasped in his early twenties. He should make that list, he decides as he descends the broad stone stairs to the ground floor, though he knows he never will. Work that you cannot begin to imagine achieving yourself, that displays a ruthless, nearly inhuman element of self-enclosed perfection - this is his idea of genius. This notion of Daisy's, that people can't 'live' without stories, is simply not true. He is living proof.

By the front door he picks up the post and the newspapers.

68 Saturday

Walking down to the kitchen he reads the headlines. Blix telling the UN the Iraqis are beginning to cooperate. In response, the Prime Minister is expected to emphasise in a speech in Glasgow today the humanitarian reasons for war. In Perowne's view, the only case worth making. But the PM's late switch looks cynical. Henry is hoping that his own story, breaking at four thirty, might just have made the late editions in London. But there's nothing.