The Magus, A Revised Version (20 page)

There was silence. The crickets chirped. Some night-bird, high overhead, croaked primevally in the stars.

‘
What happened when you got home?
’

‘
It is late.
’

‘
But
–
’

‘
Tomorrow.
’

He lit the lamp again. As he straightened up from adjusting the wick, he stared at me.

‘
You are not ashamed to be the guest of a traitor to his country?
’

‘
I
don
’
t think you were a traitor to the human race.
’

We moved towards his bedroom windows.

‘
The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.
’

‘
I suppose one could say that Hitler didn
’
t betray his self.
’

He turned.

‘
You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
’

He led the way through to my room, and lit the lamp there for me.

‘
Good night, Nicholas.
’

‘
Good night. And

But his hand was up, silencing me and what he must have guessed were to be my thanks. Then he was gone.

When I came back from the bathroom, I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to one. I undressed and turned out the lamp, then stood a moment by the open window. There was a vague smell of drains in the still air, of a cesspool somewhere. I got into bed, and lay thinking about Conchis.

Or losing him, since all my thoughts ended in paradox. If in one way he seemed much more huma
n, more normally fallible, than
before, that was tainted by what seemed like a lack of virginity in the telling. Calculating frankness is very different from the spontaneous
variety; there was some fatal extra dimension in his objectivity, which
was much more that of a novelist before a character than of even the oldest, most changed man before his own real past self. It was finally much more like biography than the autobiography it purported to be; patently more concealed lesson than true confession. It was not
that I was so self-blind that I saw nothing to be learnt. But how could
he presume this on so little knowledge of me? Why should he care?

And then there were the footsteps, a whole tangle of unrelated ikons and incidents, the photo on the
curiosa
cabinet, oblique looks, Alison, the little girl called Lily with her head in sunlight…

I was about to go to sleep.

At first hallucinatorily faint, impossible to pinpoint, it began. I thought it must be coming through the walls from a gramophone in Conchis
’
s bedroom. I sat up, put my ear to the wall, listened. And then I leapt out of bed and went to the window. It was creeping down from outside, from somewhere far to the north, well up in the hills a mile or more away. There was no light, no obvious sound except the crickets in the garden. Only, so barely perceptible that it fringed the imagined, this faintest drone of men, a lot of men, singing. I thought: fishermen. But why should they be in the hills? Then shepherds
–
but shepherds are solitaries.

It grew a little clearer, as if on a gust of wind
–
but there was no wind; swelling, then fading away. I thought for an incredible moment that I caught something familiar in the sound
–
but it couldn
’
t be. And it sank away, almost to complete silence.

Then
–
unimaginable the strangeness of it, the shock of it
–
the sound swelled again and I knew beyond doubt what was being sung up there. It was
‘
Tipperary
’
. Whether it was the distance, whether the record, because it must have been a record, had been deliberately slowed
–
there seemed to be some tonal distortion as well
– I
couldn
’
t tell, but the song came with a dreamlike slowness and dimness, almost as if it was being sung out of the stars and had had to cross all that night and space to reach me.

I went to the door of my room and opened it. I had some idea that the record-player must be in Conchis
’
s room. Somehow he had had the sound relayed to a speaker, or speakers, in the hills
–
perhaps
that was what was in the little room, relaying equipment, a generator. But there was absolute silence in the house. I closed the door and leant back against it. The voices and the song washed dimly down out of the night, through the pine-forest, over the house and out to sea. Suddenly the humour, the absurd, tender, touching poetry of the whole thing, made me smile. It must be some elaborate joke of Conchis
’
s, mounted for my exclusive benefit; and as a subtle test of my own humour, tact and intelligence. There was no need to rush about trying to discover how it was done. I should find that out in the morning. Meanwhile, I was to enjoy it. I went back to the window.

The voices had become very dim, barely audible; but something else had grown penetratingly strong. It was the cesspool smell I had noticed earlier. Now it was an atrocious stench that infested the windless air, a nauseating compound of decomposing flesh and excrement, so revolting that I had to hold my nose and breathe through my mouth.

Below my room there was a narrow passage between the cottage and the house. I craned down, because the source of the smell seemed so close. It was clear to me that the smell was connected with the singing. I remembered that corpse in the shell-hole. But I could see nothing anomalous, no movement.

The sound faded, went completely. After a few minutes, the smell too was fainter. I stood another ten or fifteen minutes, straining eyes and ears for the faintest stir. But there was none. And there was no sound inside the house. No creeping up the stairs, no doors gently closed, nothing. The crickets chirped, the stars pulsed, the experience was wiped clean. I sniffed at the window. The foul odour still lingered, but under the normal antiseptic smell of the pines and the sea, not over it.

Soon it was as if I had imagined everything. I lay awake for at least
another hour. Nothing more happened; and no hypothesis made sense.

I had entered the domaine.

Someone was knocking at the door. Through the shadowy air of the open window, the burning sky. A fly crawled across the wall above the bed. I looked at my watch. It was half past ten. I went to the door, and heard the slap of Maria
’
s slippers going downstairs.

In the glaring light, the racket of cicadas, the events of the night
seemed in some way fictional; as if I must have been slightly drugged.
But I felt perfectly clear-headed. I dressed and shaved and went down to breakfast under the colonnade. The taciturn Maria appeared with c
off
ee.

‘
Okyrios?
’
I asked.

‘
Ephage. Eine epano.
’
Has eaten; is upstairs. Like the villagers, with
foreigners she made no attempt to speak more comprehensibly, but uttered her usual fast slur of vowel-sounds.

I had my breakfast and carried the tray back along the side colonnade and down the steps to the open door of her cottage. The front room was fitted out as a kitchen. With its old calendars, its lurid cardboard ikons, its bunches of herbs and shallots and its blue-painted meat-safe hanging from the ceiling, it was like any other cottage living-kitchen on Phraxos. Only the utensils were rather more ambitious, and the stove larger. I went in and put the tray on the table.

Maria appeared out of the back room; I glimpsed a large brass bed, more ikons, photographs. A shadow of a smile creased her mouth; but it was circumstantial, not genuine. It would have been difficult enough in English to ask questions without appearing to be prying; in my Greek it was impossible. I hesitated a moment, then saw her face, as blank as the door behind her, and gave up.

I went through the passage between house and cottage to the vegetable garden. On the western side of the house a shuttered window corresponded to the door at the end of Conchis
’
s bedroom. It appeared as if there was something more than a cupboard there. Then I looked up at the north-facing back of the house, at my own room. It was easy to hide behind the re
ar wall of the cottage, but the
ground was hard and bare; showed nothing. I strolled on into the arbour. The little Priapus threw up his arms at me, jeering his pagan smile at my English face.

No entry.

Ten minutes later I was down on the private beach. The water, blue and green glass, was for a moment cold, then deliciously cool; I swam out between the steep rocks to the open sea. After a hundred yards or so I could see behind me the whole cliffed extent of the headland, and the house. I could even see Conchis, who was sitting where we had sat on the terrace the night before, apparently reading. After a while he stood up, and I waved. He raised both his arms in his peculiar hieratic way, a way in which I knew now that there was something deliberately, not fortuitously, symbolic. The dark figure on the raised white terrace; legate of the sun facing the sun; the most ancient royal power. He appeared, wished to appear, to survey, to bless, to command;
dominus
and domaine. And once again I thought of Prospero; even if he had not said it first, I should have thought of
it then. I dived, but the salt stung my eyes and I surfaced. Conchis had
turned away
–
to talk with Ariel, who put records on; or with Caliban, who carried a bucket of rotting entrails; or perhaps with … but I turned on my back. It was ridiculous to build so much on the sound of quick footsteps, the merest glimpse of a glimpse of a white shape.

When I got back to the beach ten minutes later he was sitting on the baulk. As I came out of the water he stood and said,
‘
We will take the boat and go to Petrocaravi.
’
Petrocaravi, the
‘
ship of stone
’
, was a deserted islet half a mile
off
the western tip of Phraxos. He was dressed in swimming-shorts and a garish red-and-white water-polo player
’
s cap, and in his hand he had the blue rubber flippers and a pair of underwater masks and schnorkels. I followed his brown old back over the hot stones.

‘
Petrocaravi is very interesting underwater. You will see.
’

‘
I find Bourani very interesting above water.
’
I had come up beside him.
‘
I heard voices in the night.
’

‘
Voices?
’
But he showed no surprise.

‘
The record. I
’
ve never had an experience quite like it. An extraordinary idea.
’
He didn
’
t answer, but stepped down into the boat and opened the engine housing. I untied th
e painter from its iron ring in
the concrete, then squatted on the jetty and watched him fiddle inside the hatch.
‘
I suppose you have speakers in the trees.
’

‘
I heard nothing.
’

I teased the painter t
h
rough my hand, and grinned.
‘
But you know I heard something.
’

He looked up at me.
‘
Because you tell me so.
’

‘
You
’
re not saying, how extraordinary, voices, what voices. That would be the normal reaction, wouldn
’
t it?
’
He gestured curtly to me to get aboard. I stepped down and sat on the thwart opposite to him.
‘
I only wanted to thank you for organizing a unique experience forme.
’

‘
I organized nothing.
’

‘
I find it hard to believe that.
’

We remained staring at each other. The red-and-white skull-cap above the monkey eyes gave him the air of a performing chimpanzee. And there stood the sun, the sea, the boat, so many unambiguous things, around us. I still smiled; but he wouldn
’
t smile back. It was as if I had committed
a. faux pas
by referring to the singing. He stooped to fit the starting-handle.

‘
Here, let me do that.
’
I took the handle.
‘
The last thing I want to do is to
off
end you. I won
’
t mention it again.
’

I bent to turn the handle. Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder.
‘
I am not
off
ended, Nicholas. I do not ask you to believe. All I ask you is to pretend to believe. It will be easier.
’

It was strange. By that one gesture and a small shift in expression and tone of voice, he resolved the tension between us. I knew on the one hand that he was playing some kind of trick on me; a trick like the one with the loaded dice. On the other, I felt that he had after all taken a sort of liking for mc. I thought, as I heaved at the engine, if this is the price, I
’
ll seem his fool; but not be his fool.

We headed out of the cove. It was difficult to talk with the engine going, and I stared down through fifty or sixty feet of water to patches of pale rock starred black with sea-urchins. On Conchis
’
s left side were two puckered scars. They were both back and front, obviously bullet wounds; and there was another old wound high on his right arm. I guessed that they came from the execution during the second war. Sitting there steering he looked ascetic, Ghandi-like; but as we approached Pctrocaravi, h
e stood up, the tiller expertly
against his dark thigh. Years of sunlight had tanned him to the same mahogany brown as the island fishermen.

The rocks were gigantic boulders of conglomerate, monstrous in their barren strangeness, much larger now we were close to them than I had ever realized from the island. We anchored about fifty yards away. He handed me a mask and schnorkel. At that time they were unobtainable in Greece, and I had never used them before.

I followed the slow, pausing thresh of his feet over a petrified land
scape of immense blocks of stone, among which drifted and hovered shoals
off
ish. There were flat fish, silvered, aldermanic; slim, darting fish; palindromic fish that peered foully out of crevices; minute poised fish of electric blue, fluttering red-and-black fish, slinking azure-and-green fish. He showed me an underwater grotto, a light-shafted nave of pale-blue shadows, where the large wrasse floated as if in a trance. On the far side of the islet the rocks plunged precipitously away into a mesmeric blind indigo. Conchis raised his head above the surface.

‘
I am going back to fetch the boat. Stay here.
’

I swam on. A shoal of several hundred golden-grey fish followed me. I turned, they turned. I swam on, they followed, truly Greek in their obsessive curiosity. Then I lay over a great slab of rock which warmed the water almost to bath-heat. The shadow of the boat fell across it. Conchis led me a little way to a deep fissure between two boulders, and there suspended a piece of white cloth on the end of a line. I hung like a bird in the water overhead, watching for the octopus he was trying to entice. Soon a sinuous tentacle slipped out and groped the bait, then other swift tentacles, and he began skilfully to coax the octopus up. I had tried this myself and knew it was not nearly as simple as the village boys made it seem. The octopus came reluctantly but inevitably, slow-whirling, flesh of drowned sailors, its suckered arms stretching, reaching, searching. Conchis suddenly gaffed it into the boat, slashed its sac with a knife, turned it inside out in a moment. I levered myself aboard.

‘
I have caught a thousand in this place. Tonight another will move into that same hole. And let himself be caught as easily.
’

‘
Poor thing.
’

‘
You notice reality is not necessary. Even the octopus prefers the ideal.
’
A piece of old white sheet
ing, from which he had torn his
‘
bait
’
, lay beside him. I remembered it was Sunday morning; the time for sermons and parables. He looked up from the puddle of sepia.

‘
Well, how do you like the world below?
’

‘
Fantastic. Like a dream.
’

‘
Like humanity. But in the vocabulary of millions of years ago.
’
He threw the octopus under the thwart.
‘
Do you think that has a life after death?
’

I looked down at the viscid mess and up to meet his dry smile. The red-and-white skull-cap had tilted slightly. Now he looked like Picasso imitating Ghandi imitating a buccaneer. He let in the clutch lever and we moved forward. I thought of the Manic, of Neuve Chapelle; and shook my head. He nodded, and raised the white sheeting. His even teeth gleamed falsely, vividly in the intense sunlight. Stupidity is lethal, he implied; and look at me, I have survived.