Daniel Martin (81 page)

Two cloaked figures, cowled and faintly monastic, hove into sight. Shepherds. Their flock grazed in a thin green rash of grass along the ruts beside the central camber of the road: the small ewes a soft orange-brown, the lambs piebald. One of the shepherds raised his hand gravely, almost forbiddingly, as if commanding them to stop, but Labib accelerated slightly and drove past. The road went arrow-straight, never deviating an inch. About four, when the light was already failing, the mist lifted slightly, and they could suddenly see a mile or more, only to realize they had been missing nothing—or a something that was in fact nothing: an endless expanse of sand, faint dunes, imperceptible escarpments, a huge emptiness like blank paper. They came over a small rise, however, to find something more interesting—two hundred yards away squatted a black Bedouin tent, fixed with long guy-ropes. Dan made Labib stop, and he and Jane got out for a few seconds while he took a photograph. It was bitterly cold, inhospitable, menacing. They retreated gratefully to the warm interior of the car.

Night had already begun to fall when they came to the Trans-Jordanian pipeline pumping-station; a brief landscape of tortured pale-grey pipes, army sentries, a grimly shuttered hamlet; then they were out in the desert again, with the endless road in the headlights. The cloud at least had risen, and there was less mist. From time to time they saw orange specks in the desert, kerosene lamps in other Bedouin tents. Then a moment of drama—a chain of weird shapes in the headlights, strutting with a slow, awkward dignity across the road: a string of camels, each ungainly beast attached by a rope to the one ahead. They were very mysterious, not least because they seemed unattended. Labib eased forward, but just as they passed the place where the camels had crossed, there was a metallic bang behind the car. Dan thought it was a spring, a loose exhaust pipe, but Labib raised his right arm and made a throwing gesture.

‘Stone.’

‘I didn’t see anyone.’

‘He hide.’

That, it emerged, was why he didn’t slow down to exchange friendly greetings. The Bedouins were not friendly people. It was the army trucks. They killed too many of their sheep.

Dan slid a glance at Jane. ‘You may have your adventure yet.’

‘I already am. I feel as if I’m on another planet. Nothing seems real any more.’

He reached in the darkness and took her hand; squeezed it as if to give it courage, and would have relinquished it, but the pressure was returned, and the two hands lay joined on the fabric of the seat between them; the last contact with lost reality.

Dan said, ‘Who would have dreamed this, all those years ago.’

‘I know. I was just thinking the same thing.’

He felt a minute extra pressure on his hand; then a stronger one, and the hand pulled away, as if he might have misinterpreted her first response; this in turn was covered by her reaching down for her basket and fishing for cigarettes.

Labib spoke pointing ahead in the sky. ‘Palmyra.’

There was a distant luminescence. The country seemed more hilly. They climbed a slope and there ahead, below, lay a dim cluster of lights, the modern oasis. At last the road bent, as if it had decided to grow human again. A shuttered house, then a brief glimpse of a distant ruined arch as the headlights swept round. The car slowed, then swung at right angles off the road and bumped through an unreal petrified forest of broken walls, colonnades, fallen capitals. A few hundred yards on it drew up outside a long bungalow, bizarrely like the jerry-built 1920s clubhouse of some impoverished golf-course.

‘Zenobia,’ said Labib.

It was Palmyra’s only hotel, isolated in the huge graveyard of the dead city. They stood out in the windy darkness, the freezing air. The irregular stacks of a roofless temple stood obscurely silhouetted a hundred yards away against the light-stained clouds above the invisible modern village. There was a profound silence, macabre in the oldest, and appropriately Arabic, sense of the word. Then a door opened and a shaft of yellow light fell across the sand. Labib called curtly and the man in the doorway raised his hand.

If they had imagined relief from unreality at the Hotel Zenobia, they were not to get it. Its interior proved as strange as its site. They found themselves in a large-room dominated by a huge stove, around which sat three men on wooden chairs. One, the oldest, had a squint, the other wore a long white, or once white, apron, the third was the younger man who had stood at the door. Dan and Jane were ignored. There was a conversation in Arabic, questions asked of Labib. The rear part of the room was arranged as a primitive dining-room. Some half a dozen set tables; embroidered saddle-bags, one or two carpets, on the wall. Behind the stove in the middle of the floor, against a wall, stood a high-backed old sofa, some relic of more bourgeois or more French days, covered in purple, red, indigo rugs and cushions, almost as if they were strewn there on sale; except that there was a newspaper and an indentation where someone had sat recently. The whole room was like a stage set eternally without a playwright. The cold and silence outside, the muggy warmth here, the way the men sat; evidently the hotel staff, but splendidly disinclined to show it by any welcoming courtesy or service.

Labib appeared to be giving a mile-by-mile account of the journey, but one of the men’s questions must have concerned them, since the driver, as if remembering their presence, turned and asked if they wanted to see their rooms.

The oldest man, the one with the squint, stood and beckoned them to follow. They went through a door, into darkness and a much colder atmosphere. He twisted an old ceramic switch and a feeble bulb lit a long barrack-like corridor, a row of doors. He turned to Dan and questioningly raised one finger, then two. Dan raised two in return. The old man limped a few steps down the corridor, and opened a door. A bed, a chair, a wardrobe, two strips of worn carpet on a tiled floor, a paraffin drip-stove. The old man bent and lit it; a guttering flame. He gravely opened the wardrobe, and indicated more blankets. Dan set Jane’s bag on the floor and followed the old fellow across the corridor; a similar bare room; the same process of lighting the stove. Dan turned to Jane, who had joined them.

‘It’s a bit larger. Would you rather have this?’

‘I think it’s even colder. Do you suppose there’s a bathroom?’

Rather to their amazement, there was, further down the corridor. The water ran cold, but the old man pointed to a plastic bucket, then to himself, made washing gestures—he would fetch warm water if they wanted. Labib appeared behind them. He had come to announce the menu. There was egg or lamb; noodles or rice. They chose lamb and rice.

Five minutes later Dan and Jane sat, obediently waiting, but at least warm, on the couch in the main room. The cook had disappeared, but the other two men now sat by the wall across from the stove, staring at the English couple in silence, as if they resented this irritating disturbance of their winter nights around the stove. Labib sat at one of the tables in the dining-room part, reading the newspaper. From behind a curtain at the back there came the sound of Arabic music on a wireless, the occasional scrape of a moved pan. But in the room a great silence, a formidable aura of waiting. Jane bent her head.

‘I’m going to burst into giggles if you don’t say something.’

‘I think that’s the idea. They’ve had a bet on which of us will break up first.’

‘What an extraordinary place.’

‘End of the world.’

‘It reminds me of one of those time-warp plays.’

He gave her a quick smile. ‘That’s exactly what I felt. When we came in. Whether we’ve actually really got here.’

‘We’re lying on the road out there somewhere.’

‘Labib’s going to read about it in that newspaper. Any moment now.’ She looked across at where he sat. The driver did, by chance, turn a page; and for a not quite pretending bated moment, they both watched. But then he merely felt in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes. Jane smiled down.

‘What do you suppose happens if we ask for a drink?’

‘At least ten years in the salt-mines, I should think.’

But he went over to Labib. There was only beer; that was the law. Labib spoke back to the two by the wall. The younger man disappeared into the kitchen and came back with glasses and two label-less bottles. It was local beer, very thin, but drinkable. The silence welled back, the two men continued to stare across the room. Outside, on the road from Horns, they heard a truck. But it passed on. Somewhere out in the ruins a pariah began to bark, short intermittent yaps. Labib put down his paper and stared across the empty dining-room into space; then pulled out a notebook, and began to do some sort of calculation—or so Dan guessed, since the pencil was more poised than writing. He seemed bored, not behind his wheel; a centaur who had lost his body. Dan looked at Jane.

‘Wish we hadn’t come?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘All that drag back tomorrow.’

‘I wouldn’t have missed this for anything. Now it’s happened.’

‘I feel the same.’ He murmured, ‘A loaf of bread. And thou.’

She was dry in return.

‘I don’t think I could sing in this wilderness.’

‘I’d forgotten that part of it.’ She stared down at the glass she held perched on her crossed legs. He said, ‘Not breaking my promise. Just that I’d have hated every moment of today without you.’

She said nothing, as if it could be treated as a remark that needed no answer. But the other silence, in the room, forced her to speak.

‘It’s all the other days, Dan.’

He waited a moment or two, returning the stare of the man with the squint; seemed almost to address him, though their voices had dropped so that Labib couldn’t hear.

‘In which we travel alone.’

‘At places like this…’

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes. ‘But elsewhere, sentimental aberration?’

She still looked down at her glass. ‘What one feels one must.’

Again he waited.

‘I wish it was several hundred years ago.’

‘Why?’

‘When it was literally a nunnery, one knew what one was fighting against.’

‘I’m sorry it seems like that.’

‘But it is a little?’

‘In the sense that I feel I have no other choice.’

‘Then lack of courage of a kind?’

‘I suppose.’

But she said it like someone who had weighed the two sides, and accepted a lesser accusation to spare herself a greater. Dan stared across at Labib, who yawned and put his notebook away; then stood and disappeared into the kitchen at the back. They heard him say something to the cook.

‘And you don’t think I have enough for both of us?’

‘One can’t transmit courage like that, Dan. It’s either inside you or…’

She shrugged, and her voice died away, as she clearly wished the subject would. Once again he stared at the two mute spectators opposite. Yet he clung to something. After all, she was there. She could have insisted that she did fly straight to Rome; or refused to reopen discussion now at all. There was a tiny hint in the way she sat of the disobedient schoolgirl, the waiting for further reprimand. Dan spoke quietly.

‘We’ve just been through what must be one of the loneliest landscapes in the world. You called it unreal. For me it had tremendous reality. Symbolically, anyway.’ He glanced surreptitiously towards her still bent head, ‘Do you want me to shut up?’

She shook her head. He stared down at his own glass.

‘I feel I’ve become a man driving through nothingness. Behind the screens the Herr Professor was talking about. This girl in California is just a carpet hung up to keep out the wind. I can’t go on using her like that. Apart from anything else, she knows it.’ His voice was very quiet, as if they were discussing someone else.

‘I’m making it sound as if I want you to save me from her. It’s not that at all.’

‘Nothingness is a very comparative thing, isn’t it?’

‘Meaning I’m not allowed to feel it? Economic privilege deprives you of all other human rights?’

‘Of course not. Just that… nothingness is part of the vocabulary of despair.’

‘I shouldn’t talk like Beckett?’

‘Only to the extent that you are privileged in other ways.’

He examined her downcast eyes, her obstinacy; and wondered why he now felt tender towards even this in her.

‘That’s even worse. The more you feel, the happier you have to sound?’

She made a little sideways movement of the head.

‘I was thinking of that man by the road. Holding out the duck.’

He knew what she meant: the real nothingness of some lives of many lives. The younger man opposite stood and went into the kitchen; the murmur of voices there. The old man with the squint dropped his head, as if he had dozed off.

‘I know everyone like us is profoundly lucky in a biological sense. Education, culture, money… all the rest. The logic I don’t follow is that allowing a guilt about that to dictate every decision will help at all. I’m not saying that we haven’t largely abused the gifts we were given. But when you even deny them intrinsic or potential validity—’

‘I don’t deny them that.’

‘Perhaps not in some abstract sense. But you do effectively. I’m not even allowed to have a real sense that I’ve abused them.’ He looked briefly at her face, then away. ‘We haven’t tried enough, Jane. We’ve ratted. With less excuse than any other kind of human beings in the world. Anthony should have been a priest. You should have been my wife. I should have tried to be a serious playwright.’ Still she did not speak, and he lightened his voice a little. ‘I’m not sure you’re not the most guilty of us all. You did half glimpse it at Oxford. That we were living in a dream-world.’