Justine (1957) Part II Chapter 2

Of the Cabal itself, what is there to be said? Alexandria is a town of sects and gospels. And for every ascetic she has always thrown up one religious libertine — Carpocrates, Anthony — who was prepared to founder in the senses as deeply and truly as any desert father in the mind. ‘You speak slightingly of syncretism’ said Balthazar once, ‘but you must understand that to work here at all — and I am speaking now as a religious maniac not a philosopher — one must try to reconcile two extremes of habit and behaviour which are not due to the intellectual disposition of the inhabitants, but to their soil, air, landscape. I mean extreme sensuality and intellectual asceticism. Historians always present syncretism as something which grew out of a mixture of warring intellectual principles; that hardly states the problem. It is not even a question of mixed races and tongues. It is the national peculiarity of the Alexandrians to seek a reconciliation between the two deepest psychological traits of which they are conscious. That is why we are hysterics and extremists. That is why we are the incomparable lovers we are.’ This is not the place to try and write what I know of the Cabbala, even if I were disposed to try and define ‘The unpredicated ground of that Gnosis’; no aspiring hermetic could — for these fragments of revelation have their roots in the Mysteries. It is not that they are not to be revealed. They are raw experiences which only initiates can share. I have dabbled in these matters before in Paris, conscious that in them I might find a pathway which could lead me to a deeper understanding of myself — the self which seemed to be only a huge, disorganized and shapeless society of lusts and impulses. I regarded this whole field of study as productive for my inner man, though a native and inborn scepticism kept me free from the toils of any denominational religion. For almost a year I had studied under Mustapha, a Sufi, sitting on the rickety wooden terrace of his house every evening listening to him talk in that soft cobweb voice. I had drunk sherbet with a wise Turkish Moslem. So it was with a sense of familiarity that I walked beside Justine through the twisted warren of streets which crown the fort of Kom El Dick, trying with one half of my mind to visualize how it must have looked when it was a Park sacred to Pan, the whole brown soft hillock carved into a pine-cone. Here the narrowness of the streets produced a sort of sense of intimacy, though they were lined only by verminous warrens and benighted little cafés lit by flickering rush-lamps. A strange sense of repose invested this little corner of the city giving it some of the atmosphere of a delta village. Below on the amorphous brown-violet meidan by the railway station, forlorn in the fading dusk, little crowds of Arabs gathered about groups of sportsmen playing at single-stick, their shrill cries muffled in the fading dusk. Southward gleamed the tarnished platter of Mareotis. Justine walked with her customary swiftness, and in silence, impatient of my tendency to lag behind and peer into the doorways on those scenes of domestic life which (lighted like toy theatres) seemed filled with a tremendous dramatic significance. The Cabal met at this time in what resembled a disused curator’s wooden hut, built against the red earth walls of an embankment, very near to Pompey’s Pillar. I suppose the morbid sensitivity of the Egyptian police to political meetings dictated the choice of such a venue. One crossed the wilderness of trenches and parapets thrown up by the archaeologist and followed a muddy path through the stone gate; then turning sharply at right angles one entered this large inelegant shack, one of whose walls was the earth side of an embankment and whose floor was of tamped earth. The interior was strongly lit by two petrol lamps and furnished with chairs of wicker. The gathering consisted of about twenty people drawn from various parts of the city. I noticed with some surprise the lean bored figure of Capodistria in one corner. Nessim was there, of course, but there were very few representatives of the richer or more educated sections of the city. There was, for example, an elderly clock-maker I knew well by sight — a graceful silver-haired man whose austere features had always seemed to me to demand a violin under them in order to set them off. A few nondescript elderly ladies. A chemist. Balthazar sat before them in a low chair with his ugly hands lying in his lap. I recognized him at once as if in an entirely new context as the habitué of the Café Al Aktar with whom I had once played backgammon. A few desultory minutes passed in gossip while the Cabal waited upon its later members; then the old clock-maker stood up and suggested that Balthazar should open proceedings, and my friend settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and in that harsh croaking voice which gradually gathered an extraordinary sweetness began to talk. He spoke, I remember, of the fons signatus of the psyche and of its ability to perceive an inherent order in the universe which underlay the apparent formlessness and arbitrariness of phenomena. Disciplines of mind could enable people to penetrate behind the veil of reality and to discover harmonies in space and time which corresponded to the inner structure of their own psyches. But the study of the Cabbala was both a science and a religion. All this was of course familiar enough. But throughout Balthazar’s expositions extraordinary fragments of thought would emerge in the form of pregnant aphorisms which teased the mind long after one had left his presence. I remember him saying, for example, ‘None of the great religions has done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man’s wholeness match the wholeness of the universe — even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.’ The constitution of the Cabal consisted of an inner circle of initiates (Balthazar would have winced at the word but I do not know how else to express it) and an outer circle of students to which Nessim and Justine belonged. The inner circle consisted of twelve members who were widely scattered over the Mediterranean — in Beirut, Jaffa, Tunis and so on. In each place there was a small academy of students who were learning to use the strange mental-emotional calculus which the Cabbala has erected about the idea of God. The members of the inner Cabal corresponded frequently with one another, using the curious old form of writing, known as the boustrophedon; that is to say a writing which is read from right to left and from left to right in alternate lines. But the letters used in their alphabet were ideograms for mental or spiritual states. I have said enough. On that first evening Justine sat there between us, her arms linked lightly in ours, listening with a humility and concentration that were touching. At times the speaker’s eye rested on her for a moment with a glance of affectionate familiarity. Did I know then — or was it afterwards I discovered — that Balthazar was perhaps her only friend and certainly the only confidant she had in the city? I do not remember. (‘Balthazar is the only man to whom I can tell everything. He only laughs. But somehow he helps me to dispel the hollowness I feel in everything I do.’) And it was to Balthazar that she would always write those long self-tortured letters which interested the curious mind of Arnauti. In the diaries she recorded how one moonlight night they gained access to the Museum and sat for an hour among the statues ‘sightless as nightmares’ listening to him talk. He said many things which struck her then but later when she came to try and write them down they had vanished. Yet she did remember him saying in a quiet reflective voice something about ‘those of us who are bound to submit our bodies to the ogres,’ and the thought penetrated her marrow as a reference to the sort of life she was leading. As for Nessim, I remember him telling me that once, when he was in a great agony of mind about Justine, Balthazar remarked dryly to him: ‘Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est.’ Adding as he did so: ‘I speak now as a member of the Cabal, not as a private person. Passionate love even for a man’s own wife is also adultery.’

 ***** Alexandria Main Station: midnight. A deathly heavy dew. The noise of wheels cracking the slime-slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick fa.ade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows. Standing against an insanitary brick wall to kiss her goodbye. She is going for a week, but in the panic, half-asleep I can see that she may never come back. The soft resolute kiss and the bright eyes fill me with emptiness. From the dark platform comes the crunch of rifle-butts and the clicking of Bengali. A detail of Indian troops on some routine transfer to Cairo. It is only as the train begins to move, and as the figure at the window, dark against the darkness, lets go of my hand, that I feel Melissa is really leaving; feel everything that is inexorably denied — the long pull of the train into the silver light reminds me of the sudden long pull of the vertebrae of her white back turning in bed. ‘Melissa’ I call out, but the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound. She begins to tilt, to curve and slide; and quick as a scene-shifter the station packs away advertisement after advertisement, stacking them in the darkness. I stand as if marooned on an iceberg. Beside me a tall Sikh shoulders the rifle he has stopped with a rose. The shadowy figure is sliding away down the steel rails into the darkness; a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid. I walk about Moharrem-Bey that night, watching the moon cloud over, preyed upon by an inexpressible anxiety. Intense light behind cloud; by four o’clock a thin pure drizzle like needles. The poinsettias in the Consulate garden stark with silver drops standing on their stamens. No birds singing in the dawn. A light wind making the palm trees sway their necks with a faint dry formal clicking. The wonderful hushing of rain on Mareotis. Five o’clock. Walking about in her room, studying inanimate objects with intense concentration. The empty powder-boxes. The depilatories from Sardis. The smell of satin and leather. The horrible feeling of some great impending scandal…. I write these lines in very different circumstances and many months have elapsed since that night; here, under this olive-tree, in the pool of light thrown by an oil lamp, I write and relive that night which has taken its place in the enormous fund of the city’s memories. Somewhere else, in a great study hung with tawny curtains Justine was copying into her diary the terrible aphorisms of Herakleitos. The book lies beside me now. On one page she has written: ‘It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul.’ And lower down in the margins: ‘Night-walkers, Magians, Bakchoi, Lenai and the initiated….’

 ***** Was it about this time that Mnemjian startled me by breathing into my ear the words: ‘Cohen is dying, you know?’ The old furrier had drifted out of sight for some months past. Melissa had heard that he was in hospital suffering from uraemia. But the orbit we once described about the girl had changed; the kaleidoscope had tilted once more and he had sunk out of sight like a vanished chip of coloured glass. Now he was dying? I said nothing as I sat exploring the memories of those early days — the encounters at street-corners and bars. In the long silence that ensued Mnemjian scraped my hairline clean with a razor and began to spray my head with bay-rum. He gave a little sigh and said: ‘He has been asking for your Melissa. All night, all day.’ ‘I will tell her’ I said, and the little memory man nodded with a mossy conspiratorial look in his eyes. ‘What a horrible disease’ he said under his breath, ‘he smells so. They scrape his tongue with a spatula. Pfui!’ And he turned the spray upwards towards the roof as if to disinfect the memory: as if the smell had invaded the shop. Melissa was lying on the sofa in her dressing-gown with her face turned to the wall. I thought at first she was asleep, but as I came in she turned and sat up. I told her Mnemjian’s news. ‘I know’ she said. ‘They sent me word from the hospital. But what can I do? I cannot go and see him. He is nothing to me, never was, never will be.’ Then getting up and walking the length of the room she added in a rage which hovered on the edge of tears. ‘He has a wife and children. What are they doing?’ I sat down and once more confronted the memory of that tame seal staring sadly into a human wineglass. Melissa took my silence for criticism I suppose for she came to me and shook me gently by the shoulders, rousing me from my thoughts. ‘But if he is dying?’ I said. The question was addressed as much to myself as to her. She cried out suddenly and kneeling down placed her head on my knees. ‘Oh, it is so disgusting! Please do not make me go.’ ‘Of course not.’ ‘But if you think I should I will have to.’ I said nothing. Cohen was in a sense already dead and buried. He had lost his place in our history, and an expenditure of emotional energy on him seemed to me useless It had no relation to the real man who lay among the migrating fragments of his old body in a whitewashed ward. For us he had become merely an historic figure. And yet here he was, obstinately trying to insist on his identity, trying to walk back into our lives at another point in the circumference. What could Melissa give him now? What could she deny him? ‘Would you like me to go?’ I said. The sudden irrational thought had come into my mind that here, in the death of Cohen, I could study my own love and its death. That someone in extremis, calling for help to an old lover, could only elicit a cry of disgust — this terrified me. It was too late for the old man to awake compassion or even interest in my lover, who was already steeped in new misfortunes against the backcloth of which the old had faded, rotted. And in a little time perhaps, if she should call on me or I on her? Would we turn from each other with a cry of emptiness and disgust? I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit. But she herself — austere and merciless Aphrodite — is a pagan. It is not our brains or instincts which she picks — but our very bones. It terrified me to think that this old man, at such a point in his life, had been unable to conjure up an instant’s tenderness by the memory of anything he had said or done: tenderness from one who was at heart the most tender and gentle of mortals. To be forgotten in this way was to die the death of a dog ‘I shall go and see him for you’ I said, though my heart quailed in disgust at the prospect; but Melissa had already fallen asleep with her dark head upon my knees. Whenever she was upset about anything she took refuge in the guileless world of sleep, slipping into it as smoothly and easily as a deer or a child. I put my hands inside the faded kimono and gently rubbed her shallow ribs and flanks. She stirred half-awake and murmured something inaudible as she allowed me to lift her and carry her gently back to the sofa. I watched her sleeping for a long time. It was already dark and the city was drifting like a bed of seaweed towards the lighted cafés of the upper town. I went to Pastroudi and ordered a double whisky which I drank slowly and thoughtfully. Then I took a taxi to the Hospital. I followed a duty-nurse down the long anonymous green corridors whose oil-painted walls exuded an atmosphere of damp. The white phosphorescent bulbs which punctuated our progress wallowed in the gloom like swollen glow-worms. They had put him in the little ward with the single curtained bed which was, as I afterwards learned from Mnemjian, reserved for critical cases whose expectation of life was short. He did not see me at first, for he was watching with an air of shocked exhaustion while a nurse disposed his pillows for him. I was amazed at the masterful, thoughtful reserve of the face which stared up from the mattress, for he had become so thin as almost to be unrecognizable. The flesh had sunk down upon his cheek-bones exposing the long slightly curved nose to its very roots and throwing into relief the carved nostrils. This gave the whole mouth and jaw a buoyancy, a spirit which must have characterized his face in earliest youth. His eyes looked bruised with fever and a dark stubble shaded his neck and throat, but under this the exposed lines of the face were as clean as those of the face of a man of thirty. The images of him which I had so long held in my memory — a sweaty porcupine, a tame seal — were immediately dissolved and replaced by this new face, this new man who looked like — one of the beasts of the Apocalypse. I stood for a long minute in astonishment watching an unknown personage accepting the ministration of the nurses with a dazed and regal exhaustion. The duty-nurse was whispering in my ear: ‘It is good you have come. Nobody will come and see him. He is delirious at times. Then he wakes and asks for people. You are a relation?’ ‘A business associate’ I said. ‘It will do him good to see a face he knows.’ But would he recognize me, I wondered? If I had changed only half as much as he had we would be complete strangers to one another. He was lying back now, the breath whistling harshly through that long vulpine nose which lay resting against his face like the proud figurehead of an abandoned ship. Our whispers had disturbed him, for he turned upon me a vague but nevertheless pure and thoughtful eye which seemed to belong to some great bird of prey. Recognition did not come until I moved forward a few paces to the side of the bed. Then all at once his eyes were flooded with light — a strange mixture of humility, hurt pride, and innocent fear. He turned his face to the wall. I blurted out the whole of my message in one sentence. Melissa was away, I said, and I had telegraphed her to come as quickly as possible; meanwhile I had come to see if I could help him in any way. His shoulders shook, and I thought that an involuntary groan was about to burst from his lips; but presently in its place came the mockery of a laugh, harsh, mindless and unmusical. As if directed at the dead carcass of a joke so rotten and threadbare that it could compel nothing beyond this ghastly rictus gouged out in his taut cheeks. ‘I know she is here’ he said, and one of his hands came running over the counterpane like a frightened rat to grope for mine. ‘Thank you for your kindness.’ And with this he suddenly seemed to grow calm, though he kept his face turned away from me. ‘I wanted’ he said slowly, as if he were collecting himself in order to give the phrase its exactest meaning, ‘I wanted to close my account honourably with her. I treated her badly, very badly. She did not notice, of course; she is too simple-minded, but good, such a good girl.’ It sounded strange to hear the phrase ‘bonne copine’ on the lips of an Alexandrian, and moreover pronounced in the chipped trailing sing-song accent common to those educated here. Then he added, with considerable effort, and struggling against a formidable inner resistance. ‘I cheated her over her coat. It was really sealskin. Also the moths had been at it. I had it relined. Why should I do such a thing? When she was ill I would not pay for her to see the doctor. Small things, but they weigh heavy.’ Tears crowded up into his eyes and his throat tightened as if choked by the enormity of such thoughts. He swallowed harshly and said: ‘They were not really in my character. Ask any business man who knows me. Ask any one.’ But now confusion began to set in, and holding me gently by the hand he led me into the dense jungle of his illusions, walking among them with such surefootedness and acknowledging them so calmly that I almost found myself keeping company with them too. Unknown fronds of trees arched over him, brushing his face, while cobbles punctuated the rubber wheels of some dark ambulance full of metal and other dark bodies, whose talk was of limbo — a repulsive yelping streaked with Arabic objurgations. The pain, too, had begun to reach up at his reason and lift down fantasies. The hard white edges of the bed turned to boxes of coloured bricks, the white temperature chart to a boatman’s white face. They were drifting, Melissa and he, across the shallow blood-red water of Mareotis, in each other’s arms, towards the rabble of mud-huts where once Rhakotis stood. He reproduced their conversations so perfectly that though my lover’s share was inaudible I could nevertheless hear her cool voice, could deduce her questions from the answers he gave her. She was desperately trying to persuade him to marry her and he was temporizing, unwilling to lose the beauty of her person and equally unwilling to commit himself. What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced this whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life. He did not know then how much he loved her; it had remained for me to teach him the lesson. And conversely how was it that Melissa had never spoken to me of marriage, had never betrayed to me the depth of her weakness and exhaustion as she had to him? This was deeply wounding. My vanity was gnawed by the thought that she had shown him a side of her nature which she had kept hidden from me. Now the scene changed again and he fell into a more lucid vein. It was as if in the vast jungle of unreason we came upon clearings of sanity where he was emptied of his poetic illusions. Here he spoke of Melissa with feeling but coolly, like a husband or a king. It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner self, so long dammed up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his consciousness. It was not only Melissa either, for he spoke of his wife — and at times confused their names. There was also a third name, Rebecca, which he pronounced with a deeper reserve, a more passionate sorrow than either of the others. I took this to be his little daughter, for it is the children who deliver the final coup de grace in all these terrible transactions of the heart. Sitting there at his side, feeling our pulses ticking in unison and listening to him as he talked of my lover with a new magistral calm I could not help but see how much there was in the man which Melissa might have found to love. By what strange chance had she missed the real person? For far from being an object of contempt (as I had always taken him to be) he seemed to be now a dangerous rival whose powers I had been unaware of; and I was visited by a thought so ignoble that I am ashamed to write it down. I felt glad that Melissa had not come to see him die lest seeing him, as I saw him now, she might at a blow rediscover him. And by one of those paradoxes in which love delights I found myself more jealous of him in his dying than I had ever been during his life. These were horrible thoughts for one who had been so long a patient and attentive student of love, but I recognized once more in them the austere mindless primitive face of Aphrodite. In a sense I recognized in him, in the very resonance of his voice when he spoke her name, a maturity which I lacked; for he had surmounted his love for her without damaging or hurting it, and allowed it to mature as all love should into a consuming and depersonalized friendship. So far from fearing to die, and importuning her for comfort, he wished only to offer her, from the inexhaustible treasury of his dying, a last gift. The magnificent sable lay across a chair at the end of the bed wrapped in tissue paper; I could see at a glance that it was not the sort of gift for Melissa, for it would throw her scant and shabby wardrobe into confusion, outshining everything. ‘I was always worried about money’ he said felicitously ‘while I was alive. But when you are dying you suddenly find yourself in funds.’ He was able for the first time in his life to be almost light-hearted. Only the sickness was there like some patient and cruel monitor. He passed from time to time into a short confused sleep and the darkness hummed about my tired ears like a hive of bees’. It was getting late and yet I could not bring myself to leave him. A duty-nurse brought me a cup of coffee and we talked in whispers. It was restful to hear her talk, for to her illness was simply a profession which she had mastered and her attitude to it was that of a journeyman. In her cold voice she said: ‘He deserted his wife and child for une femme quelconque. Now neither the wife nor the woman who is his mistress wants to see him. Well!’ She shrugged her shoulders. These tangled loyalties evoked no feeling of compassion in her, for she saw them simply as despicable weaknesses. ‘Why doesn’t the child come? Has he not asked for her?’ She picked a front tooth with the nail of her little finger and said: ‘Yes. But he does not want to frighten her by letting her see him sick. It is, you understand, not pleasant for a child.’ She picked up an atomizer and languidly squirted some disinfectant into the air above us, reminding me sharply of Mnemjian. ‘It is late’ she added; ‘are you going to stay the night?’ I was about to make a move, but the sleeper awoke and clutched at my hand once more. ‘Don’t go’ he said in a deep fragmented but sane voice, as if he had overheard the last few phrases of our conversation. ‘Stay a little while. There is something else I have been thinking over and which I must reveal to you.’ Turning to the nurse he said quietly but distinctly, ‘Go!’ She smoothed the bed and left us alone once more. He gave a great sigh which, if one had not been watching his face, might have seemed a sigh of plenitude, happiness. ‘In the cupboard’ he said ‘you will find my clothes.’ There were two dark suits hanging up, and under his direction I detached a waistcoat from one of them, in the pockets of which I burrowed until my fingers came upon two rings. ‘I had decided to offer to marry Melissa now if she wished. That is why I sent for her. After all what use am I? My name?’ He smiled vaguely at the ceiling. ‘And the rings —’ he held them lightly, reverently in his fingers like a communion wafer. ‘These are rings she chose for herself long ago. So now she must have them. Perhaps….’ He looked at me for a long moment with pained, searching eyes. ‘But no’ he said, ‘you will not marry her. Why should you? Never mind. Take them for her, and the coat.’ I put the rings into the shallow breast-pocket of my coat and said nothing. He sighed once more and then to my surprise, in a small gnome’s tenor muffled almost to inaudibility sang a few bars of a popular song which had once been the rage of Alexandria, Jamais de la vie, and to which Melissa still danced at the cabaret. ‘Listen to the music!’ he said, and I thought suddenly of the dying Antony in the poem of Cavafy — a poem he had never read, would never read. Sirens whooped suddenly from the harbour like planets in pain. Then once more I heard this gnome singing softly of chagrin and bonheur, and he was singing not to Melissa but to Rebecca. How different from the great heart-sundering choir that Antony heard — the rich poignance of strings and voices which in the dark street welled up — Alexandria’s last bequest to those who are her exemplars. Each man goes out to his own music, I thought, and remembered with shame and pain the clumsy movements that Melissa made when she danced. He had drifted now to the very borders of sleep and I judged that it was time to leave him. I took the coat and put it in the bottom drawer of the cupboard before tip-toeing out and summoning the duty-nurse. ‘It is very late’ she said. ‘I will come in the morning’ I said. I meant to. Walking slowly home through the dark avenue of trees, tasting the brackish harbour wind, I remembered Justine saying harshly as she lay in bed: ‘We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.’