Daniel Martin (72 page)

Jane said gently, ‘You wish he didn’t live so far away?’

The old man shrugged. ‘He has his work, his friends… and at least I have my memories.’ He gave Jane a small smile. ‘Which you awoke a little the other day, madame.’

‘Why was that?’

‘You will think me very sentimental.’

‘Please.’

He hesitated. ‘My wife’s poor patients often had no money too pay her. They would bring her small presents instead. Sometimes they would be strings of beads of the kind you bought in Mr Abdullam’s shop. As an archaeologist, I would tell her they were worthless. But she would say… what you said that afternoon, madame. And something in the way you touched your beads. Your voice.’ He smiled drily at Dan. ‘I am sorry. Forgive me.’

Dan indicated that there was nothing to forgive. Jane was staring down at her lap. There was a little silence. Then she looked up.

‘I think I envy your wife, professor. For having been able to do so much more than feel.’

‘That is already more than most. Alas.’

‘She died here?’

‘In Germany. At Leipzig. After the war.’

‘You spent that there?’

The old man shook his head, and spoke with a certain grimness. ‘In Palestine. In a British internment camp.’

Then slowly, under their further questions, he must have sensed their curiosity, he began to talk more in detail of his past—quite objectively, as if he were a site, not himself; not unlike the way in which he had outlined Queen Hatshepsut’s life to them at Thebes.

He had never been a fascist, but he took little credit for that. He had lived too much out of Germany in the 1930s. He had found the demagogy, the mass rallies, the appeals to Volk, unattractive, but no more than the vulgar trappings of a fundamentally necessary government. He could not remember ‘der Führer’ and the rest of National Socialist jargon ever cropping up in conversation with most of his friends and associates without a certain irony. At the time it all came from another world, it was beneath serious discussion. One conveyed one’s attitude by not talking about such things. Then there was his wife, and the entree he had through her into English circles in Cairo. There too the subject was rarely discussed. The moment of truth had come when Hitler revealed his true colours in 1939. Many of his German colleagues in Egypt had returned home and he was ordered to do so himself.

‘So. At last I was forced to think of a world beyond that of ancient Egypt and my wife and children. She helped very much. We decided our marriage was more important than our difference of nationality. That I would take my luck here. I had begun to suspect my country was wrong. I would not fight against it. But I would not fight for it.’

During a year, in the phony war, he had been allowed to continue his archaeological work. Then he was interned, and had spent the remaining years in a camp in Palestine. He said the conditions had not been comfortable, but the company had been valuable. He had learnt a great deal about something of which he had hitherto been ‘a little ignorant’: other men.

‘Of course I knew when the war ended that my country had deserved its defeat. The Jewish genocide. I was brought that news, the first discovery of the concentration camps—by my wife. I can still see the newspaper. The Daily Telegraph. The photographs. I wept, but I am afraid it was not for the dead Jews, it was for myself. My race. I could not look at my wife. She had supported me and my children so bravely through those unhappy years.’

Jane said gently, ‘But she can’t have blamed you?’

‘No. Not at all. But our two sons… it was difficult for them, poor boys. I think perhaps they judged better. They knew their father had failed. As his fatherland had failed.’

‘By omission?’

‘I thought of it by an example from my work, Mr Martin. If I had transcribed only what I could read easily of a papyrus, and pretended what I needed, more patience more examination, did not exist. I recalled so many things, so many signs I had preferred not to see or hear before the war. The part of the papyrus I had neglected to read—that was not difficult to see.’

Then outside circumstances took a hand. His ‘unpatriotic’ attitude at the outbreak of the war and the fact that so many contemporaries in his field had died or disappeared, or elected now to stay in the West, made his specialized knowledge a rare commodity. Out of the blue he was asked back to Leipzig to rebuild the faculty—’if you can call a faculty a large hut without students. A collection of packing cases. An almost total loss of records.’

‘We had much discussion. My sons did not want to go. But their mother knew I would not be at peace if I did not go. We tried to explain to the boys why it was our duty to go.’

‘The political side didn’t worry you?’

The old man smiled. ‘A little, yes. You must understand, we were not sophisticated people in that way. There was work for Constance—she had always worked by preference with children. I had my old university. My great feeling I must help now, even though it was too late.’

So they had gone. His wife had died during their third year in the ravaged city—a great shock, an unexpected haemorrhage after a hysterectomy. But he thought her last gift had ‘in a most sad way’ been to leave him a German alone in Germany, he now belonged to more out of a sense of duty than from any deeper attachment. He was forced to re-examine his beliefs. He had never joined the Communist Party, and his status as a scholar had put him in a privileged position as regards ‘official pressures’; but he had come to accept that socialism was best for the country and at the time in history. It had its inhumanities, ‘its blind places’; but so perhaps began all new and better societies.

Though he had passed very briefly over his wife’s death, and left so much unsaid, they had a sense of a very real marriage; as, too, of an innocence in the old man and his dead wife; of two people alienated from both sides, split across the Iron Curtain, with only their mutual respect and love to sustain them, their professional work. He even said as much, how his two sons’ practically demonstrated division of feeling reflected something of his own.

He told them then that his younger son, the one who was now an archaeologist in the United States, had originally escaped to the West. The old man smiled.

‘He took after his mother. In character. I call him my English son.’

There had been nothing dramatic in his escape. He had been on holiday in London with relations of his mother, and had simply not returned. He had just had his twenty-fifth birthday. The professor had tried to make him come back, but not very seriously.

‘At his age it is sometimes more important to take decisions than to be sure they are right.’

Dan said, ‘At all ages?’

‘Perhaps.’

Jane asked if the two brothers remained on good terms.

‘Yes, madame.’ He added, ‘Now. Hans, my older son, the doctor, he would not accept such treachery to begin with. But he is wiser now. I believe they sometimes argue very much. When they meet. But like brothers.’

‘And you don’t take sides?’

‘I find my younger boy a little too American now. We do not see things the same way. But why should we? My generation were blinded especially we so-called students of history. We must pay for it. His is innocent. And as I say, he takes after his mother. Or her country.’ He smiled at them both. ‘The Sphinx of Europe.’

Dan said, ‘More familiarly known as the Sick Man of Europe.’

‘If obstinacy is a sickness.’

‘Surely not very enigmatic?’

‘There I must disagree. To us foreigners… ‘

‘But your English…’

‘Oh yes. I speak the language. I understand English ways. I even grew to like English cooking—steak-and-kidney pie…’ and he lingered a moment, as if over the memory of some rare claret. ‘But your soul. That is another question.’ He raised one of his admonitory fingers. ‘And above all in this matter of freedom. A German cannot think of freedom without rules. That is much more than our love of goose-marching and military discipline—which is a Prussian matter, in any case. It is in our philosophers. In Kant, in Marx. In Bach. Goethe. For us, all freedom is no freedom. We may dispute over the rules, but not that they must be there.’

Dan smiled. ‘But our freedom is largely an illusion. As we’re beginning to realize.’

The old man was silent a moment, then quizzed them.

‘You know the story of the West German cousin who visited his East German relations? The talk came to politics. The West German told his relations that their lives were dictated by the state, by the Russians. They retorted that his half of Germany was no better—it was the most Americanized in Europe. Perhaps, he said, but at least we have freely chosen it, in the democratic Anglo-Saxon way. Ah, said his uncle, but so have we freely chosen, my boy. And what is more, in the democratic German way.’ The old man acknowledged their smiles, but went on. ‘I think the point is this whom is the joke against? I have heard it told as a satire on East Germany. Yet I think it may be told also in its favour. It depends you see, on how you defame the contrary of freedom. For us, it is chaos. For you…’

‘Authority?’

He nodded. ‘That is the true curtain between East and West. In my opinion. We sacrifice some of our freedom to have order, our leaders would claim social justice, equality, all the rest. While you sacrifice some of your order to have freedom. What you call natural justice, the individual rights of man.’ He suddenly smiled, as if they were becoming too serious. ‘May I tell you one more story? It is against the English, but it was told me many years ago by a compatriot of yours.’

‘Of course.’

‘An Englishman in French Africa goes swimming towards a place where there are crocodiles. A native on the bank who speaks English cries to him. “Turn back! Danger! Turn back at once!” The Englishman hears, he looks round, the black man cries again. But the Englishman takes no notice at all. He goes on swimming. And he is killed. The French authorities hold an inquiry—no one can understand why the victim ignored the warning. But another Englishman stands up to explain. The warning had been given in incorrect language, it would not have been understood. Ah. Then would monsieur please tell the court the correct call, in case such an unhappy event occurred again? The Englishman thinks, considers very deeply, then he says, “Would you mind awfully turning back… sir, please?” smiled, a little less genuinely than before.

‘It is cruel. But I have a suspicion that something in your country would still rather drown than be given good advice by a foreigner. That is the freedom I do not understand.’

‘We don’t understand it very well ourselves.’

The old man smiled. ‘Never mind. Who knows? Perhaps that Englishman wanted to be eaten by crocodiles.’

Dan glanced at Jane, who had been silent for a while; but there was a gentleness in her eyes, an agreement, at least as regards the old scholar. They looked down, then Dan spoke again.

‘Do you have any hope for the conflict between East and West?’

‘I used to feel guilt that I have spent so much time studying the past. I saw my papyri as screens I had put up to hide what I did not wish to understand. I now see everything is a kind of screen if one wishes it so. An excuse for not understanding.’ He paused, then went on. ‘I remember—this is before the war—a dispute between two villages on opposite banks of the Nile. North of Luxor, where I was then working. It was over rights of fishing. It became very bitter, blood was shed. One day I asked one of the headmen concerned—a peasant, illiterate, but a very wise old man—why he and the other village leader could not settle the matter by compromise. He reprimanded me for such foolish optimism. He told me there would never be peace among men, on either bank. Only in the river between.’

‘The one place we can’t live.’

The old man opened his hands.

And then he told them a last story: a personal one, what he called a ghost story without a ghost. It had happened soon after he first came to Egypt, in the late 1920s, before he had specialized in his subsequent field. He had been working one day in one of the recently excavated noble—as opposed to royal—tomb-chambers in the cliffs opposite Aswan; and became so absorbed in his work, recording a wall-painting, that he stayed on later than usual. Working by artificial light, he had not noticed that dusk had fallen outside. But then something, perhaps caused by his long hours of concentration, perhaps by an unconscious realization that all was now silent on the site, happened. He had a curious sense of a living presence that was not his own. It was for a moment frightening, indeed he shone his light round the tomb, but he was not in the least a believer in the supernatural… in curses and such nonsense. His fear was a more straightforward physical one—that some thief had sneaked in. But there was a night-watchman who guarded the access to the site. He thought perhaps it was this man, he even called his name. There was no answer, and then he had stared again at the wall-painting, which happened to be in an exceptionally fresh state.

He had paused at that point in his story. They heard someone come into the lounge behind them, but neither Dan nor Jane turned; and whoever it was, went away again.

‘I have had this experience again, but never so vividly as on that first occasion. It is of a most strange… like a broken link in time.’

‘A dislocation?’

‘Yes. Thank you. That is a better word. For a little interval time does not seem to exist. One is neither the original painter nor one’s own self, a modern archaeologist. If one is anything—I speak metaphorically, forgive me, I lack words to express it in any other way, one is the painting. One exists, but it is somehow not in time. In a greater reality, behind the illusion we call time. One was always there. There is no past or future. One’s knowledge of history, chronology, seems like one of those screens I spoke of just now.’ He smiled at them. ‘This is not to do with mysticism. It is almost physical, something hidden in the nature of things. I once had a similar experience, also after many hours of work, with a difficult papyrus. I became the papyrus. I was beyond time. Yet it did not help me decipher it at all. So. It was not in that sense that I was the papyrus. Perhaps I was the river. For a few moments whatever in the river does not pass. That river between.’ He said nothing for a few seconds, then gave Jane and Dan a little look. ‘I am afraid that is what they will never understand. The river between.’