V. (64 page)

"Don't be sad."

"Brenda, we're all sad."

"Benny, we are." She laughed, raucous, having a low tolerance for sloe gin.

They went back to his place and she must have left him sometime during the night, in the dark. Profane was a heavy sleeper. He awoke alone in bed to the sound of forenoon traffic. Maijstral sat on the table, observing a plaid knee sock, the kind worn with Bermuda shorts, which was draped over the electric lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling.

"I have brought wine," said Maijstral.

"Good enough."

They went out to a cafe for breakfast, about two. "I have no intention of supporting you indefinitely," Maijstral said.

"I should get a job. Any road work in Malta?"

"They are building a grade intersection - an underground tunnel - at Porte-des-Bombes. They also need men to plant trees along the roads."

"Road work and sewer work is all I know."

"Sewers? There's a new pumping station going up at Marsa."

"They hire aliens?"

"Possibly."

"Possibly, then."

That evening Brenda wore paisley shorts and black socks. "I write poetry," she announced. They were at her place, a modest hotel near the great lift.

"Oh," said Profane.

"I am the twentieth century," she read. Profane rolled away and stared at the pattern in the rug.

"I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government; the cafe-dansant the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone; the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the traveling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night."

"That sounds about right," said Profane.

"I don't know." She made a paper airplane out of the poem and sailed it across the room on strata of her own exhaled smoke. "It's a phony college-girl poem. Things I've read for courses. Does it sound right?"

"Yes."

"You've done so much more. Boys do."

"What?"

"You've had all these fabulous experiences. I wish mine would show me something."

"Why."

"The experience, the experience. Haven't you learned?"

Profane didn't have to think long. "No," he said, "offhand I'd say I haven't learned a goddamn thing."

They were quiet for a while. She said: "Let's take a walk."

Later, out in the street, near the sea steps she inexplicably took his hand and began to run. The buildings in this part of Valletta, eleven years after war's end, had not been rebuilt. The street, however, was level and clear. Hand in hand with Brenda whom he'd met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond.

Epilogue

1919

I

Winter. The green xebec whose figurehead was Astarte, goddess of sexual love, tacked slowly into the Grand Harbour. Yellow bastions, Moorish-looking city, rainy sky. What more on first glance? In his youth no one of those score or so other cities had ever shown old Stencil much in the way of Romance. But now as if making up for lost time his mind seemed to've gone rainy as the sky.

He kept near the stern, rained on, bird-frame wrapped in oilskin, sheltering his pipe's match from the wind. Overhead for a while hung Fort St. Angelo, dirty yellow and wrapped in a quiet not of this earth. Abeam gradually came H.M.S. Egmont, a few seamen on her decks like blue-and-white dolls shivering for the Harbour wind, holy stoning to work off this morning's chill. His cheeks hollowed and flattened as the xebec seemed to describe a complete circle and Grandmaster La Vallette's dream whirled away for Fort St. Elmo and the Mediterranean, which in their turn spun past into Ricasoli, Vittoriosa, the Dockyard. Mehemet the master swore at his helmsman, Astarte now leaned from the xebec's bowsprit toward the city as if it were male and asleep and she, inanimate figurehead, a succubus preparing to ravish. Mehemet approached him. "Mara lives in a strange house," said Stencil. Wind flapped one whitening forelock, rooted halfway back on his scalp. He said it for the city, not for Mehemet; but the master understood.

"Whenever we came to Malta," he said in some Levantine tongue, "I got the feeling. As if a great hush were on this sea and the island its heart. As if I'd come back to something my own heart needs as deeply as a heart can." He lit a cigarette from Stencil's pipe. "But it is a deception. She's an inconstant city. Be wary of her."

One hulking boy stood on the quay to receive their lines. He and Mehemet exchanged salaam aleikums. A pillar of cloud stood to the north behind Marsamuscetto, looking solid and about to topple; to crush the city. Mehemet wandered about kicking the crew. One by one they drifted below decks and began hauling the cargo topside: a few live goats, some sacks of sugar, dried tarragon from Sicily, salted pilchards in barrels, from Greece.

Stencil had his gear collected. The rain descended more quickly. He opened a great umbrella and stood under it watching the Dockyard country. Well, what am I waiting for, he wondered. The crew had retired below decks all sullen. Mehemet came squishing across the deck. "Fortune," he said.

"An inconstant goddess." The pier hand who'd taken their lines now sat on a piling, facing the water, hunched up like a bedraggled sea bird. "Island of sunshine?" Stencil laughed. His pipe was still lit. Among white fumes then he and Mehemet made farewell. He teetered across a single plank to shore, balancing a ditty bag on one shoulder, the umbrella looking like a tightrope-walker's parasol. Indeed, he thought. What safety, after all, on this shore. Ashore anywhere?

From the window of a cab, proceeding in the rain along Strada Reale, Stencil could detect none of the holiday one saw in other capitals of Europe. Perhaps it was only the rain. But welcome relief surely. Stencil was fed to surfeit on songs, bunting, parades, promiscuous loves, uncouth noisemakings; all the normal responses of noncombatants-in-the-mass to Armistice or peace. Even in the normally sober offices in Whitehall, it had been impossible. Armistice, ha!

"I cannot understand your attitude," from Carruthers-Pillow, then Stencil's superior. "Armistice, ha, indeed."

Stencil muttered something about things not being stabilized. How could he tell Carruthers-Pillow of all people, who felt in the presence of the most inconsequential chit initialed by the Foreign Secretary much as Moses must have toward the Decalogue God blasted out for him on stone. Wasn't the Armistice signed by legally-constituted heads of government? How could there not be peace? It would never be worth the trouble arguing. So they'd stood that November morning, watching the lamplighter extinguish the lights in St. James's Park, as if having long ago passed through some quicksilver surface from when Viscount Grey had stood perhaps at the same window and made his famous remark about the lamps going out all over Europe. Stencil of course didn't see the difference between event and image, but saw no advantage in disturbing his chief's euphoria. Let the poor innocent sleep. Stencil had merely been dour, which in him passed for high celebration.

Lieutenant Mungo Sheaves, aide to the Officer Administrating Government on Malta, had set before Whitehall an architecture of discontent: among the police force, the University students, the civil service, the Dockyard workers. Behind it all lurked "the Doctor"; organizer, civil engineer: E. Mizzi. A bogeyman to Major General Hunter-Blair, the OAG, Stencil guessed; but found it took him an effort to see Mizzi as anything but a busy man-of-policy, agile, Machiavellian, a trifle old-fashioned, who'd managed to last as far as 1919. For a survival like that Stencil could only feel a wistful pride. His good friend Porpentine - twenty years ago in Egypt - hadn't he been the same sort? Belonged to a time where which side a man was on didn't matter: only the state of opposition itself, the tests of virtue, the cricket game? Stencil may have come in on the tail end.

It must be shock, fine: even Stencil could feel shock. Ten million dead and twice that wounded if nothing else. "But we reach a point," he'd thought of telling Carruthers-Pillow, "we old campaigners, when the habits of the past become too strong. Where we can say, and believe, that this abattoir, but lately bankrupt, was fundamentally no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Sudanese wars, even the Crimea. It is perhaps a delusion - say a convenience - necessary to our line of work. But more honorable surely than this loathsome weakness of retreat into dreams: pastel visions of disarmament, a League, a universal law. Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself."

On route to Valletta - the steamer to Syracuse, the week of lying doggo in a waterfront tavern till Mehemet's xebec arrived; all the way across a Mediterranean whose teeming history and full depth he could not feel, nor try, nor afford to try to feel, old Stencil had had it out with himself. Mehemet had helped.

"You're old," the skipper mused over his nightly hashish. "I am old, the world is old; but the world changes always; we, only so far. It's no secret, what sort of change this is. Both the world and we, M. Stencil, began to die from the moment of birth. Your game is politics which I don't pretend to understand. But it seems that these -" he shrugged - "noisy attempts to devise political happiness: new forms of government, new ways to arrange the fields and workshops; aren't they like the sailor I saw off Bizerte in 1324." Stencil chuckled. Mehemet's recurring lament was for a world taken from him. He belonged to the trade routes of the Middle, Ages. According to the yarn he had in fact sailed the xebec through a rift in time's fabric, pursued then among the Aegean Islands by a Tuscan corsair which mysteriously dropped from sight. But it was the same sea and not until docking at Rhodes did Mehemet learn of his displacement. And since had forsaken land for a Mediterranean which thank Allah would never change. Whatever his true nostalgia he reckoned by the Moslem calendar not only in conversation but also in logs and account books; though the religion and perhaps the birthright he'd let pass years ago.

"Slung on a stage over the gunwale of an old felucca, the Peri. A storm had just passed, rushing away toward the land in a great slope of clouds; already turning yellowish from the desert. The sea there is the color of Damascus plums; and how quiet. Sun was going down; not a beautiful sunset, more a gradual darkening of the air and that storm's mountainside. The Peri had been damaged, we hove to alongside and hailed her master. No reply. Only the sailor - I never saw his face - one of your fellahin who abandon the land like a restless husband and then grumble for the rest of their term afloat. It's the strongest marriage in the world. This one wore a kind of loincloth and a rag round his head for the sun which was almost gone. After we'd shouted in every dialect we had among us, he replied in Tuareg: 'The master is gone, the crew is gone, I am here and I am painting the ship.' It was true: he was painting the ship. She'd been damaged, not a load line in sight, and a bad list. 'Come aboard,' we told him, 'night is nearly on us and you cannot swim to land.' He never answered, merely continued dipping the brush in his earthen jar and slapping it smoothly on the Peri's creaking sides. What color? It looked gray but the air was dark. This felucca would never again see the sun. Finally I told the helmsman to swing our ship round and continue on course. I watched the fellah until it was too dark: becoming smaller, inching closer to the sea with every swell but never slackening his pace. A peasant with all his uptorn roots showing, alone on the sea at nightfall, painting the side of a sinking ship."

"Am I only getting old?" Stencil wondered. "Perhaps past the time I can change with the world."

"The only change is toward death," repeated Mehemet cheerfully. "Early and late we are in decay." The helmsman began to sing a monotonous, Levantine lanterloo. There were no stars and the sea was hushed. Stencil refused hashish and filled his pipe with a respectable English blend; lit up, puffed, began:

"Which way does it go? As a youth I believed in social progress because I saw chances for personal progress of my own. Today, at age sixty, having gone as far as I'm about to go, I see nothing but a dead end for myself, and if you're right, for my society as well. But then: suppose Sidney Stencil has remained constant after all - suppose instead sometime between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle - blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether fatal. This is how the public, you know, see the late war. As a new and rare disease which has now been cured and conquered for ever."

"Is old age a disease?" Mehemet asked. "The body slows down, machines wear out, planets falter and loop, sun and stars gutter and smoke. Why say a disease? Only to bring it down to a size you can look at and feel comfortable?"

"Because we do paint the side of some Peri or other, don't we. We call it society. A new coat of paint; don't you see? She can't change her own color."

"No more than the pustules of smallpox have anything to do with death. A new complexion, a new coat of paint."

"Of course," said Stencil, thinking of something else, "of course we would all prefer to die of old age . . ."

The Armageddon had swept past, the professionals who'd survived had received no blessing, no gift of tongues. Despite all attempts to cut its career short the tough old earth would take its own time in dying and would die of old age.