Stewart, Angus (22 page)

The muttering guy-ropes were hazardous to negotiate. Stumbling over one, Brown cursed Manolo's improvidence in not having thought of a torch. Remembering the incongruous glare of the headlamps, Jay was chauvinistically inclined to think them better without one.

He had been right about the sweet-stalls. They came abruptly upon a veritable highway of them. Here the cold white mantles of sophisticated pressure lamps shone brilliantly.

'Halwah
!' Naima exclaimed delightedly; and thenceforth showed as resolute determination to linger as a child.

'The stuff's been specially blessed,' Brown explained lugubriously.

And she'll feed some into that child for no other reason, Jay thought to himself, dispassionately watching what was obviously a syphilitic vendor chewing his hand sufficiently free of an impossible conglomeration of nougat to be able to seize the gigantic, oozing block again. He attacked the monolith brutally with a four-foot knife; paused, blocked alternate nostrils with the back of a raised wrist to send twin streaks of phlegm chasing each other into the darkness, and then hefted both shoulders to the knife handle like an all-in wrestler intent upon a killing application of the half-nelson.

'Could that have been a gesture of distaste for the Christian, do you think?' Brown asked curiously.

'Be as well to shop further along,' Jay said.

And at another stall Naima found what she wanted. It was the quantity that amazed Jay. The sticky, nut-filled toffee was golden this time, dripping honey. Naima ordered a kilo of this, and a second kilo from a more compressed block, solid as granite, and in which the nut kernels were bedded like fossils. A chisel and mallet were used to flake it in chips. The bulky mass of confectionery was wrapped first in a sporting newspaper, and then in raw brown paper, whose porous texture could not contain the seepage for long.

They turned away from the brightly lit pitch of the merchants. A thud of drums, the savage admonition of tambourines, and the wandering, reed-textured melody of wind instruments now reached them from many directions. Brown paused, listening, beside a tent from which music came. He shook his head. 'Too many writers in there,' he said. 'Writers?' Jay asked in bewilderment.

'R.h.a.t.a.h.s.,' Brown spelt out the musical instrument. 'I don't like their tone.'

It was visually that the choice was made. Like waifs at a fair, they peeped through a hole in a tent. 'Yes,' Brown decided, and led the way to the entrance. Jay, with Naima close beside him, tried to feel inconspicuous. Both musicians and dancers were resting as the proprietor received them, and a hundred pairs of brown eyes were free to consider their entry. These studied the two Christians and the city girl with a reserve that was as impregnable as it was indefinable, but behind which some catalyst of acceptance must have been at work, for the men made space on the floor, and their eyes lost interest as their minds formulated inscrutable conclusions. After that the patrons ignored them. The dancers did not.

The space cleared for dancing was only a few square feet. Collapsed in boredom at the edge of it, one of the boys regarded them steadily. First only his hand discovered impatience, and the tambourine he held rustled menacingly. A noseless man brought them mint tea. As Jay looked up again the boy's whole arm came alive, the taut skin of the tambourine thudding against his knee now, As increasingly urgent and muttering rhythm hypnotically drawing the musicians from their
kif
and tea, while he preserved his own clumsily sprawled languor on the floor. He was about fourteen, his hair falling loose to the shoulders, and was dressed in an ankle-length gown that had once been yellow. The heavy girdle about his waist, bulky as a cork lifebelt, was bound with faded red cloth. His companion was much younger, and relaxed without arrogance. He sat waiting with his knees drawn up, fingers locked about the skirt of an even tattier blue gown, and wearing a headscarf over short, curly hair. Brown didn't take his eyes off him.

'
Kif
?’ he asked Jay.

Jay shook his head and eased his cramped position on the matting. Another tambourine, drums, and plucked strings were drawn into increasingly agitated syncopation by the scattering rush of sound released imperiously by the boy as he continued to recline. A flute joined, traversing the seemingly endless gradation of quarter-tones, its fluid melody miraculously free within some fourth dimension of sound. The little boy had got up.

'I think I will,' Brown said.

Jay found his whole consciousness becoming locked to the sound. The percussive rhythm informed his body directly, as though there were a physical bond between this immemorial and alien artifice and his own living tissue. He became an integral part of the music, but an integral part of his surroundings as well, until the sprawled immobility of those crowded about him, the taut canopy of black goatskin that enclosed the world, and even the wind, snatching beneath its ill-tethered sides to wrestle the naked lamp flames, belonged, and were inseparable from one another. Brown's match flared in the periphery of his vision. The leap and subsidence of its flame only complemented the start of a tambourine, the uncertain flutter of nerve tissue in his own belly and eyelids.

Jay looked at Naima. Until now he had been afraid to. But she was part of the harmony. As he looked away he defined his fear. The discovery gave him the courage to look at her again; and he knew an irreparable change had taken place inside him. She was more than his embodiment of an integrated world he had glimpsed through the thudding rhythm, and more than a tangible focus which the eye and mind so desperately sought when the music released him into the terrifying apprehension of transcendence. The music stated man's ability to survive. For himself, just one man, Naima could make survival possible. Jay felt smaller, not larger. His eyes wandered unfocused. The music permeated the locked wonder of his discovery. But it seemed also to be exploring the savagery and sadness of existence; its triumph too, and, above all, its unimaginable size. An animal rictus tautened his lips. He looked again at Naima. For a moment he had seen the two of them as minute, crystalline sand grains on the littoral of Africa. How vast and lonely it was. And for a moment the music exploded vanity, threatened severance, mocking accident. Jay found her hand and held it with a tenacity that made her flinch.

'Oh Lord!' Brown said, with a strangled, almost drowning reverence.

Jay became aware that the first dance had finished, and that the little dancer had dropped to his knees in front of Brown, who looked mesmerised. The company, Jay noticed, allowed the child's action to set a seal of approval upon their own acceptance of the strangers. Many were smiling as they watched. Venally their eyes encouraged Brown. They began to understand him.

'Its only because you've more money than anyone else,' Jay said uncharitably.

'I've dreamt of Manolo's one day dedicating me a bull in Madrid.' Brown ignored him. 'And now this. Whatever do I do?'

'Give him a coin.' There was no point in telling Brown to endeavour to look graciously indifferent at the same time. Brown felt hurriedly in his pocket He handed something across as though awesomely offering payment to an oracle. The little boy kissed him wetly on the forehead.

'That must have been a lordly coin,' Jay said. 'Shall I signal the trumpeter?'

Ruefully Brown smiled. 'Shut up.'

'It's only that he may come to me next, and I don't want to be reproached by soulful eyes.'

'I hadn't thought of that.' Brown looked perplexed, jealousy perhaps outweighing consideration for Jay's pocket. 'I'll pretend to be your servant,' Jay said. He looked back at Naima, suddenly impatient of the veil, anxious to know the mood of feature it concealed. There couldn't have been a more impossible place in which to draw it down. Taking advantage of the mass hypnosis now, for the boy was dancing again, he surreptitiously pinched her bottom. There was a crinkling at the corners of the eyes again, and the fringe of the veil trembled. A smile clearly. Jay did it again, with subtler pressure.

'It would be rather
impertinent
in
the Christian . . . wouldn't it?' Brown whispered uncertainly.

'He won't think so,' Jay said 'But call it a straight gamble on what may be transmitted to Manolo.'

'The real pros are usually safe,' Brown said, as though he badly needed to believe it.

The second dance was outspokenly erotic. The boy's body discovered successive series of trained muscles whose very existence one would not even have suspected as he sat motionless, and a little bored, on the floor. Now the insistent drums, shuddering up crescendo, produced an equally unimaginable response in them. The child held his head preternaturally still. His eyes, staring always straight ahead, had neither focus nor emotion, as though life had been consciously withdrawn from them to animate the fury convulsing his body. The economy left his features expressionless. In his belly, hips, and juddering shoulders, the release of energy was limitless, implausible. It was only with deliberate exercise of mind that Jay was able to acknowledge the dance as controlled from within that still, indifferent head; for the music seemed physically to torment the slight body, demanding of its mobility a plastic expression and proof of its own dominance. The dancer became the music's plaything, condemned to mirror in every muscle the liberation the music so tortuously sought Tumescence was timelessly sustained. Indignation, dalliance, pride, fight, abandon, savagery, the music, whether with insistent drum or wilting flute, demanded the, projection with a remorseless empiricism. Only when it seemed the audience must draw a second breath did the child finally throw himself forward on the floor, twitching in simulated orgasm.

Jay looked at his watch, to find at first that memory was reluctant to tell him what the instrument was for. The last breath had been taken nearly an hour previously. The dancer picked himself up, acknowledged the demented applause with a slight smile, and sat down, a rather vapid, and quite unexhausted child again. Someone passed him a cigarette. Then he looked at Brown.

"Bout an hour at the taxi? Two?' Jay felt disingenuous as he stood up.

'Two,' Brown said dully. Perhaps he was remembering his own dictum about not smoking
kif
on top of whisky. He didn't look capable of standing.

  *  *  *  *  *

Harold Lom watched a very different dance. He stood in the open, pressed amid a throng of spectators about a bonfire. At 3.0 a.m. the wind was cold, and the flame, grappled angrily with the night. The dancers were all-comers from the crowd. Some dozen were congregated in rows, shaking raggedly in a state of trance, like mindlessly manipulated marionettes. The object of the exercise seemed to be the collapse of the dancer in total submission to Allah, and this climax he would sometimes accentuate by an apparently careless act of violence on his own person. Lom had already seen a man prostrate himself in the fire, to be pulled out, quite without hurry or concern by the spectators, while one of their number stepped forward to take his place, and in minutes was sleep-dancing with rolling eyes and seemingly dislocated limbs like the rest. The weird profession of human servitude, and perverse heightening of insistence upon a state where the body became abnegated and unknowing in its determination to discover sufficient spirit with which to confound the inevitability of death, for this was how Lom saw the demonstration, gathered starker seriousness from the dark ring of unmoving spectators, and the complete absence of extraneous sound.

The compelling focus was the flute player. He was also a visual constant He sat in the dazzling aura of a pressure lamp that was intensely white and unwavering beside the struggling flames of the bonfire, and seemed to own something of eternity. He was dressed completely in white, turbanned, with ageless features of unimaginable peace. The heavy instrument he held pointed defiantly at the sky, where its end drew slow parabolas as, with closed eyes, permanently distended cheek, and the sinuous side-stepping of fingers, his body, from the hips upwards, swayed in pliant, measured ecstasy all its own.

The drums rose in a wave of greater urgency, taking their lead from the keening anguish of the flute. Their pounding shocked Lom's body. It was less the effect of something heard, or assault upon the ears, than of direct violence to the marrow of his bones, as if he had fallen heavily upon the base of his spine. The earth beneath his feet seemed savagely to stir. In the firelight one of the dislocated dancers had a bottle. He had scooped it up from the feet of a spectator some moments before; and now it dangled beside his shuddering body, its purpose only the more sinisterly underlined in that all of him save the hand that held it was nerveless jelly. Then consciousness returned to his other hand sufficiently to tear his chest bare, and, simultaneously, he broke the bottle on the hard ground. It was disconcerting; almost as if the man were perpetrating fraud. Rut perhaps, like the keening of bereaved women, the trance was none the less real for the apparent ease with which it could be switched either on or off. There was nothing invalid about the stroke the man suddenly made with the jagged glass; the Startling whiteness of the revealed ribs in the fraction of a second before the blood burst, rushing to obscure their nakedness. Once again, complete impassivity distinguished the faces of the people, relations perhaps, who helped the collapsed man into the encircling darkness. On his face there was only bliss, tempered by an awareness of martyrdom. His expression was perhaps ridiculous. Lom's mind, at least, was uneasily seeking some clarification of this impression, when he became unexpectedly aware of some limitation imposed upon his physical field of vision. He had watched the whole drama through a ninety millimetre lens; and now he had consciously to halt his pressuring forefinger and flicking thumb.

Something hit his temple, blinding him. There was a sudden pain in his chest. He had time only to sense the crowd as no longer silent before he turned to run, stumbling unseeingly, the stones striking against his back now, and the pursuers' cries sharp, vengeful in his ears.