I Came, I Saw Part 11

Back in Tunis, where the shadows have lengthened, to find Leopold on firm regimental ground again, but - as was to be expected with his recovery - Merrylees once again fading fast. Merrylees sets his absurd tasks and Leopold, tongue in cheek, sees to it that they are carried out. The FSO has been taken with a sudden mania for numbers. Having counted all the cars, I am told to count the houses in Carthage, La Marsa, Le Kram and La Goulette. This I set about doing, handing in daily totals to Leopold, who nods gravely, and sets the information aside for incorporation in the weekly report. This, according to the section member who types the final result, is an extravagant absurdity. He is bound to secrecy, but goes so far as to admit that the last report was unintelligible to him, although several Latin tags included were familiar. In his effort to keep us, as he puts it, on our toes the FSO has decided that we should arrange to lecture the neighbouring units. We take this to be on topics such as security of access and the disposal of cla.s.sified material, but this proves far from the case. What Merrylees has in mind is morale-boosting get-togethers with veterans who have spent three years in the Western Desert, and are now reported as being, perhaps in consequence, somewhat cast down in spirit. He proposes we should remedy the state of affairs by readings of selected pa.s.sages from the sagas, and by an account of the doings of Eric the Red, equally calculated in his opinion to have a tonic effect.

We all agree that one way out of this increasingly impossible situation would be for Leopold to ask to see the G2 at GHQ and tell him what is happening, but this he resolutely refuses to do, knowing only too well how the Army is accustomed to deal with bringers of bad news.

This sense of being confined in an open prison is heightened by the sudden dearth of letters from home from which we all suffer. Due to some breakdown in the Army postal service there has been no mail for weeks, but apart from this sudden stoppage, I am not the only one to notice that the bundles of letters collected for the section seem to be getting smaller. This is a situation calculated to turn men who hardly ever set pen to paper into excellent correspondents, and one section member - whether or not he has been able to post it - has written a letter to his wife every day he has been overseas. He is now tremendously depressed because it is two months since he has heard from her. It is five months since I have had news of Ernestina.

Today a letter arrived. I tore open the envelope and a half-dozen tatters of paper fell out, on which I recognized my own handwriting. Accompanying these fragments was the long awaited letter from Guatemala.

The enclosed gives you some idea of what's left when the censors have done their work. Once again, not a single comprehensible sentence. I know you're out there somewhere, that's all. The rest is silence.

It seems a long time since Cuba, doesn't it? I wonder how the years have treated you. They've had their effect on me, but it's happened so slowly that it's only when I look back I say to myself, my G.o.d, can I really have changed so much? n.o.body should really stay too long in a place like this. People don't think here; first of all because they don't need to think, and then because they've forgotten how to. I read Time because there's nothing else to read, and that marks me down as an intellectual.

I'm afraid it has to be faced. I've given in. This is like a bullfight. I'm there for no other reason than that the others are, half-asleep, up in the tendidos. We go to the fiestas and throw confetti at each other, and the men get on their horses and pull c.o.c.kerels' heads off. Remember when I told you about the first one I went to. You were disgusted, and so was I. Now I'm beginning to stop thinking, nothing has much effect. Last week they tied some Indian bandits up in chairs and shot them in the plaza, and the whole town turned out including every single member, male and female, of our legation - and guess who else? I've used up my protest, and that's what Guatemala does to anybody in the end, unless they're strong - which I'm not. Perhaps I see myself for the first time, and realize I'm a very ordinary sort of person. Just like a lizard, lying in the sun.

Chapter Twenty-One.

FEW PEOPLE FREQUENTED THE Chat Qui Rit, as the cafe-bar at the port of La Goulette was called, and those who did were from the depressed cla.s.ses: fishermen who took their evil-looking fish there to be cooked, a man who watched over the plumbing of the local p.i.s.soirs, and a carpet-seller who admitted he was lucky to sell a carpet once a month.

One morning we had a customer of a different kind. He was intelligent-looking and a little sombre, and dressed in a dark, well-fitting suit that could have been made in Paris. Taking a seat, he sat bolt upright, thus - by comparison with the slouching regulars - giving an impression of alertness. When he beckoned in the direction of one of the Jewish girls, he expected and got service. In the matter of race he struck me as one of those borderline cases, either Arab or Jew - a man of the kind who had been in contact with power, which always seemed to me to have a deracializing effect, and provided its own international face. He ordered tea, and was served the usual stew-up of old leaves to which a sprinkling of new ones had been added. He took a sip, left it, paid, then stuck a tip under the saucer. I got the impression that the very special flies of La Goulette were bothering him. After a while he got up, came over and greeted me in Arabic, salaam aleik.u.m. I acknowledged the greeting in the usual way, and he dropped into a chair at the next table so that we were seated side by side.

'So you speak Arabic?' he said in English.

'A few words,' I told him, and hoped it would be left at that. One was always running into people wanting to talk to strangers, because they were lonely or curious, or had something to sell, or were just compulsive talkers, and without being rude I got rid of them as soon as I could. He paid me a routine insincere compliment on my p.r.o.nunciation, and it was clear that this man would not be easily put off.

'La Goulette,' he said, 'is not very interesting.' I agreed with him, and this gave him the opportunity to ask what I was doing there, in reply to which I said the first thing that came into my head.

Next, as a matter of routine, it was the British royal family, always dragged in at such random encounters to keep up the conversation. 'You English are royalists, and we are royalists, too. All of us. You have a King and we have a Bey. This is the best system for us all.'

I said something non-committal.

He wagged a warning finger under my nose, and the sharp intelligent eyes mirrored mistrust. 'The French are no good,' he said.

'Why do you say that?'

'Because they are finished. Defeated.' He made a finicky gesture of distaste as if rejecting unsatisfactory food. Arabs frequently sought to curry favour with us by remarks of this kind, as if purporting to be aware of hidden tensions in the relations.h.i.+p between the two nations. I made no comment.

It was past midday and I was due back at our office in Le Kram. I made to get up, and he laid a hand on my sleeve. 'I will speak with you about a confidential matter. It is our wish for you to see the brother of our Bey.'

'Excuse me, but what on earth for?'

'It would be interesting for us. Also I think for you.'

'For me personally?'

'No, I think for your country it would be interesting.'

Mysterious approaches of this kind happened from time to time, and at Philippeville we had soon learned that they were rarely to be taken seriously. There was one chance in ten that there was something at the back of this to be investigated. I offered to pa.s.s the man on to Leopold and make an appointment for him, but he would have none of this. The meeting at the Bey's palace was to be with me, and questioning him as to why this should be, he became vague and evasive. I asked him who had directed him to me, and why, and he fenced me off with his secret smile. 'We know of you,' he said. 'That is why I have come to talk to you in this way.' He handed a splendidly engraved card. 'Jean-Claude Melia, Conseiller la Cour de Sa Majeste le Bey.' I began to be impressed, and to argue with myself that there was nothing to be lost in such a meeting, which might at least prove to be a memorable adventure. It was agreed that we should meet later that day, when I would give him my answer.

Leopold wanted to know what exactly was a bey, and I explained that he was the ruler of the country under the French. In this case some confusion arose because there were two beys, one the royal figurehead and the second, Sidi Lamine Bey, the 'Bey du Camp', the power behind the throne and Commander of the Palace Guard. It was the Bey du Camp with whom the meeting would be arranged.

'And who's this man you've been talking to?'

'Melia. Jean-Claude Melia. He's some sort of adviser.'

'He's not in the book,' Leopold said. He was referring to the book in which names of several hundred suspects were listed, and the fact that he could make such a positive announcement off the cuff suddenly made me suspicious. Could Leopold be in some way mixed up with this? I tested him with a pretence of lack of interest. 'Do you want to bother with this?' I asked.

'Go along with him,' Leopold said. 'I don't have to tell you what to do. You might get the section an invitation to the palace. Do us all a bit of good. Might even be a bit of harem going spare.' This enthusiasm only strengthened my suspicion.

I asked him if he wanted a report at this stage, and he said, 'No, why? There's nothing to report about.'

Next day Melia drove me to the Bey's palace at Ka.s.sar Said, among the orange orchards five miles out of Tunis. He handed me over to a palace official who led the way into a garden and left me in a rose arbour, with an entrance guarded by an enormous negro in an old-style Turkish uniform, holding a drawn scimitar. Shortly the Bey came floating into sight in a cloud of billowing lawn. He was carrying a white cat with long silky fur which he handed over to an accompanying servant, before greeting me. He said 'Ahlan wa sahlan' ('Welcome') three times, and asked with extreme politeness in a slightly disembodied voice after my health and that of the members of my family, before we settled facing each other at a little table covered with ceramic tiles, upon which another servant placed two gla.s.ses of mint tea.

The Bey du Camp, a man in early middle age, was saturated with patrician Arab restraint. All his movements were delicate and controlled, and through - as I imagined - a lifelong avoidance of displayed emotion, his face was strangely devoid of lines, and had about it something of a Madame Tussaud's model. Even the small, glittering eyes in their setting of white, unwrinkled skin, seemed never to move. 'Welcome,' he said once again, before we raised the gla.s.ses of tea to our lips.

Arabic, using a modest vocabulary, stripped of provincial barbarism, and the verbs confined to their simple form, is the easiest of languages, made all the more so by the emphatic p.r.o.nunciation of its consonants. The Bey employed the language in the pellucid form of the Koran, minus its archaism. He spoke slowly as if to a young child and was miraculously understandable. Delivering his message, he came straight to the point. Tunisia, he said, was about to sever its links with France which, legally, had no longer any claim upon a protectorate which it had failed to protect. The choice that faced it was between a royalist or republican form of government, and the Bey clearly favoured the first alternative, mentioning that the republican Destour movement, if allowed to take power, would introduce socialism into a strategically placed Mediterranean country, which clearly n.o.body wanted.

A third servant, ebony-faced, in blue and gold livery stood like a graven image, holding a silver platter at our side. This held iced and perfumed squares of cambric, and between sips of mint tea, the Bey picked one up in his tapered, waxen fingers, pressed it to his lips and let it fall on the ground. I followed suit. The Bey sat with his back to the opening of the bower on a scape of lawns and flowering trees, and beyond the janissary in his braided gilet and ta.s.selled cap, with his scimitar resting on his shoulder, a capering juggler, brought to entertain us, played on a pipe held in one hand and threw b.a.l.l.s into the air and caught them with the other.

The Bey said, 'We are not prepared to surrender our country to socialism. Instead, we wish to become part of the British Empire.'

'What was it like?' Leopold asked.

'Like a film set.'

'How was the palace?'

'I didn't go inside. We stayed in the garden.'

'So what does the Bey want, then?'

'He wants us to take over Tunisia. We're going to win the war, he says, and he'd like his country to be in the Empire.'

Leopold let out a howl of delight. He danced all round the office, then opened the door and looked down the pa.s.sage to satisfy himself that n.o.body was within earshot. 'Tell me about this man. Are you sure he's right in the head?'

'The Bey's n.o.body's fool, and he knows what's happening. For example he knows all about the Sicilian thing, including the date.'

'I don't even know that.'

'It's all set for the second week in July.'

'Christ,' Leopold said. 'We've really hit on something this time.'

'And not only that. He's in touch with the Sicilian separatists in this town. They don't want to stay with Italy, but they're ready to fight for the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. They'd turn the island over to us and ask to become a protectorate.'

Leopold shook his head. 'It's getting too big for us now. We can't handle it. As soon as a word of this gets out they'll take it away from us. We'll have had it.'

I told him that I wasn't altogether sure of that. For reasons that still remained a mystery to me, the Bey had insisted that he was not prepared at this stage to discuss his plans with anyone but myself. I could only suppose he was under some terrific misapprehension about a powerful agent of Intelligence Service britannique sheltering behind the stripes of an FS sergeant.

He thought about this and agreed that it might be the case. In a burst of renewed optimism he decided that we all might come out of this with emergency commissions. 'So how's it been left?' he asked.

'There's to be another meeting this day next week. If we show interest he'll be ready with concrete proposals.'

'What are we going to do about Merrylees?' Leopold asked.

I asked him what he suggested, and he said it was essential to report the meeting that had taken place to cover us in case the whole thing blew up in our face. We had to find some way of playing it down, he thought - a sort of casual mention slipped into the body of the main report, that with luck might be overlooked. It was lucky that Merrylees had been out of circulation for a couple of days, giving out that he was ill. It might make him all the less likely to be able to concentrate.

Between us it was arranged that I should produce a voluminous and largely nonsensical report, stuffed with the meaningless statistics of which Merrylees was especially fond, and that among this a single vaguely worded sentence would refer to the visit to the Bey. At this point I asked for an outright a.s.surance from Leopold that he had had no previous knowledge of this affair, and he used some sort of Sephardic oath to swear he hadn't.

I was left with an unsolved mystery. For an instant I was tempted to accept the presence in the Corps of some previously unsuspected rationality. Could it possibly be that the visits so long ago to the War Office, and the captain in the Mayfair flat, had led in the end through the long odyssey of stultification at Omagh, Winchester, Matlock and the coal-tips of Ellesmere Port to the palace of Ka.s.sar Said?

The credulous moment evaporated. I had every reason to know that in the Intelligence Corps there was no divinity that shaped our ends, no unseen but watchful eye, no enduring memory for its sons. Muddle ruled us. We were lost in the files, sent to the wrong country, inevitably innocent of what we would encounter when we got there. I came to the conclusion that the most likely solution to this riddle was that I had been chosen to play a part in a crafty game permitting the Army to reap what benefit it could from a potentially embarra.s.sing overture, while not appearing to be involved. For a general to have talked to the Bey might have been a dangerous matter, a motive for recrimination between allies, even scandal. A sergeant counted for nothing. He could be instantly repudiated, explained away as having interfered without authorization in what did not concern him. The more I thought about this the less I could believe that it was likely to end well.

Collapsing confidence sent me back to Leopold for rea.s.surances. 'I don't want to put myself in a position where I could be thrown to the lions for free-lancing,' I explained. Leopold told me to leave it to him. He'd make absolutely sure that I was covered in the report. Some way had to be found of playing it down, he said, or Merrylees would be sure to wreck everything. 'Just suppose he doesn't pick it up,' I said. 'What are we going to tell the Bey? That the British are interested? How can we do that?'

'I don't know,' he said, 'but we'll think of something by next week.'

This was a Tuesday, and the weekly report to which we were all supposed to contribute something went in to Merrylees next morning. On the rare occasions when an item took his eye, he might send for the author of the information and ask a few desultory questions. The report was put together by Leopold and what usually worried Merrylees was its lack of style, but apart from a little chiselling away at the grammar and punctuation, it normally went through untouched, to be typed out in final form by the section clerk for presentation to the G2. No more, and no less, Leopold found out, had happened in this case.

Some time on Wednesday afternoon Merrylees sent for the couple who looked after us, and after a few words to them in Latin - which he a.s.sured Leopold that as Italians they understood perfectly - he set them to work with brooms, mops and pails to clean his office up. This, with the furniture polis.h.i.+ng that followed, occupied the rest of their afternoon and part of the evening, in consequence of which they were unable to cook the evening meal. As soon as Merrylees had dismissed the Italians, his driver-batman was called on to press his uniform and polish his equipment. This signified to us that the FSO proposed to visit GHQ for once, and hand the report in in person. It was something that happened on average once a month. Otherwise Leopold deputized for him.

Next morning, Thursday, before leaving for GHQ with the report, Merrylees paraded the section for a morning meeting. With most sections this was a daily routine, but with us it had only happened four or five times since the section had been formed. We filed into the office and lined up, and Merrylees watched us intently with a tiny glint of canine teeth in the fixed grin we had come to regard as a warning of strain. The office was usually in a mess, and anyone who called in to see the FSO could expect to find him rummaging through the papers strewn over his desk, and piled on the floor. Now, wherever we looked, there were empty, polished surfaces. The files were no longer in sight, the notices had been removed from the notice board, and the in-and-out trays had gone. In their place on the desk-top stood two toy-soldiers in uniforms of the last century, and the framed portrait of an elderly woman.

Captain Merrylees got up, came round the desk and walked towards us. He walked slowly down our line, stopping in front of each man for a prolonged scrutiny of his face. The muscles round his mouth seemed to have twisted it into a kind of cramp over which he had no control. There was anger in his expression but also a kind of bewilderment, and when his lips moved as we stood facing each other and he seemed about to speak, I half-expected him to ask the question, 'Who are you? Do I know you?' Leopold at attention, and stick under his arm, watched from beside the desk, and as Merrylees moved on we exchanged a quick, puzzled glance. A moment later this eerie episode was at an end, without a word having been spoken. Leopold asked for permission to dismiss, and we filed out.

The rest of Thursday and Friday pa.s.sed without incident. Our bilingual senior sergeant, who was the only member of the section Merrylees showed any liking for, saw him on several occasions and reported him as not only calm but unusually cheerful. The Italian servant was delighted to receive a substantial tip for the extra work he and his wife had done, and showed his appreciation by presenting Merrylees with a splendid bouquet which was now in a vase on Merrylees' desk, along with the two toy soldiers and the portrait.

On Sat.u.r.day evening I found Melia in the Chat Qui Rit, attended by one of the Jewish sisters called Rebka, who was seated at his table strumming a bandurria. As I came in she got up, whispering as she pa.s.sed me, 'Es un seor muy grande - muy importante.'

I sat down with Melia, who wanted to know if there was any news, and when I said there was not he asked if I was hopeful as to the way things were progressing.

To this I replied that I was as much in the dark as he was, and that we should have to be patient until Tuesday, when there should be something to report. This seemed the moment to tackle him on the subject of my doubts, and I told him I felt disinclined to involve myself any further unless it could be explained why I should have been singled out for the approach.

'On Tuesday,' he said, 'you will be seeing His Highness again. If you ask him, I'm sure he will tell you. Why should he not?'

The Jewish girl came with her bandurria and sang cante flamenco to us, and we sat drinking and listening to the music for an hour or so, and then I saw Leopold beckoning to me in the doorway of the cafe. I went out, overpowered suddenly by a tremendous premonition.

'Nice night,' Leopold said. 'Let's go for a walk.'

We strolled down to the water's edge. Suddenly Tunis had come to life again with a fresh movement of s.h.i.+ps, and a few that had not been squeezed into the main harbour had been sent to La Goulette. By daylight they seemed little better than hulks with the paintwork everywhere bubbling over eruptions of rust. Night in Tunis was kind to them, and at a distance they could have been ocean-going liners with all the pa.s.sengers asleep in their cabins. 'Have to take a look over them in the morning,' Leopold said, but something in his voice warned me that this was no more than a private thought spoken aloud, from which I should have been excluded.

Everything in Leopold's manner was slightly abnormal. Above all, whether or not he really had anything to say, he was a man who fought shy of silence. We walked on a few more yards under the shapes of the s.h.i.+ps, and suddenly - speaking as if something has just occurred to him - he said, 'Things all right with you, then?' Why the solicitude? I wondered, beginning to understand that something had gone wrong.

'Things are all right with me, but what's happened?' I asked.

'You've been posted,' Leopold said.

'Couldn't you have told me before?' I said. By this time I already knew what was coming.

'I only just heard myself. It was written on a slip of paper Merrylees handed to me. That was all. Not a word out of him.'

'What's it all mean?' I asked. 'Is this the high jump - or just another muddle?'

'There's no way of knowing. I'm in the dark as much as you are.'

'Can I see him?'

'What's to stop you? But it won't do you any good. Anyway, what have you got to worry about? It's a wonderful let-out for you. We're going to be stuck here for the rest of the war. You'll be where the action is. It'll be like starting all over again. I only wish I were in your shoes.'

'What section is it?'

'A new one. One-o-one. Coming up from Algiers.'

'And going to Sicily?'

'Where else? It looks like your friend the Bey was right.'

'What's the objection to my waiting for them here?'

'Because it's not the way the Army works. You have to go all the way to Algiers and come all the way back again.'

'Are you going to do anything about the Bey?'

'No,' he said. 'I'm not in a position to.'

'If he knows about the invasion, just about everybody else does. Even if we don't want him in the Empire, surely that's something to worry about.'

'f.u.c.k the Bey, and f.u.c.k the Empire,' Leopold said. 'The report went in, and that's the end of it, so far as I am concerned. What more do you expect me to do?'

I watched him go, taken by surprise suddenly by the realization that it would come as a wrench to leave this place. Suddenly I admitted to myself, with shame - as if to a weakness - that La Goulette in its sly and diffident fas.h.i.+on had won me over. And more than that, for now, late in the day, I accepted that if there were a place in which to take refuge, in which to go to earth while the spirit renewed itself, and the eye corrected its vision, this was it.'

Calmly and surrept.i.tiously La Goulette turned its back on the world. The drums thudded across the pink waters of the lake but it might have been for a dance. When the planes took off at El Ariano the flamingos stood up in our shallow lagoon, flapped their wings and skipped defiantly into the air, and that was about as much as we heard or saw of the war. People here, whatever their race, were linked together by a kind of low key, unselfconscious amity. The Jews played their bandurrias at Arab weddings, and the Arabs sat down to eat at the tables of the Jews. Living in La Goulette was like breathing in the smoke of opium that slowed the movements, pacified the thoughts and replaced the noxious habit of action with a taste of introspection. All the Algerians had found reason for hating someone, but in reality Algeria was Europe. Here in La Goulette the East began. The Tunisians were the calmest of the Arabs, ready on the slightest pretext to embrace a stranger in an unemotional way. For me it had been the best of both the Eastern and Western worlds, remote yet not cut off, and the lines of communication between La Goulette and home remained intact. In the end the letters would have arrived with an explanation of why they had been so long delayed. Utter silence awaited in Sicily. Silence, and a long banishment.

Leopold's footsteps had died away. The time had come to take leave of my friends in the Chat Qui Rit, and then I saw the man coming with his ladder to light up the mosque ready for the call to prayer, one of the many small routine entertainments that La Goulette offered.

No one here, except for the Jewesses in making their music, did anything well, and this man's inefficiency never failed to enchant me. He carried a ladder with several rungs missing, stood it against the mosque's wall, climbed up and began to twist wires together. The fishermen, still at the quayside, who seldom caught a fish by day, let alone by night, turned to watch the performance. A dozen or so lights came on, then, in a shower of sparks and a wisp of smoke, went out again, while on the ladder the electrician had done something to the wiring of the public address system over which the call to prayer would be made. We all waited and in a moment the call began. Through faults in the system I had never known the affirmation of the Muslim faith to be given in its entirety, but at least hitherto it had got as far as 'There is no G.o.d, but G.o.d'. This time it spluttered into silence after the atheistic declaration, 'There is no G.o.d -.' Beliefs were held lightly in La Goulette and fanaticism unknown. Everyone, including the electrician, laughed. 'Tomorrow,' he said, 'they will deliver the new transformer at last. Come back tomorrow, sir, and you will see the whole mosque lit up as never before, and for once not a single word of the call to prayer will be lost.'

'Tomorrow,' I told him, 'Destiny had decided that I shall not be here, but be sure I'll be with you in the spirit.'