The High Place (17 page)

‘A couple of nights ago,’ he replied. ‘He made a parcel of Gisorius.’

‘Did you eat with him afterwards?’

‘Just a snack with the patrol,’ he said, and dropped the subject.

I had forgotten that Juan never noticed what he ate. Food to him was just something you couldn’t do without.

‘Ashkar makes a fuss,’ I suggested hopefully. ‘Even of that.’

‘Fuss!’ he laughed. ‘It took two troopers and his orderly just to warm up some meat in leaves.’

I ordered more sherry and relaxed. Czoldy would never find out that the Coriolanos delivered by Gisorius were harmless until they failed to take effect. And that meant that his first and finest
opportunities would be lost.

Then I turned to the cautious examination of Juan’s opinions. I told him of my business in Aleppo—which was to book, if I could get it, a very big order for ploughs and
combines—and explained how agricultural machinery would change the whole life of the steppes of northern Syria, where there were no features to check the run of plough and harvester but the
man-made hillocks, a hundred feet high, formed by mud-hut built on mud-hut for the last six thousand years. I was aware, I said, of an inconsistency between my beliefs and my trade. This land of
beehive huts, its soil only scratched by wooden ploughs, would become a plateau of windy wheat, pouring down its grain over new railways and roads to the Mediterranean or the banks of the
Euphrates; and that meant that the State, hitherto known to the fortunate peasant only through the policeman and the dis­tant post-office, would interfere with every activity of his life. His
prosperity might be greater, but his freedom to live and die as he liked would be gone.

Juan laughed, and said that there was no inconsistency, that I was a practical prophet of anarchy. The long-term result of my agricultural machinery would merely be to make the Syrian plain a
desert.

‘Then am I justified in making deserts?’ I asked him. ‘Are all means justifiable?’

He looked at me keenly to see if I were serious—for our conversation had been tuned to sherry and a casual meeting—and then replied to me as if he weighed his responsibility for
every word.

‘Yes. All means. But, mark you, friend, before you can under­stand my faith, you must understand communism. The com­munists are honest, as I am. They are full of pity, as I am, and
appalled at the needless misery of the world. They look for­ward, as I do, to the extinction of the State, and we all believe that the end justifies the means.

‘But here we part company. They have faith that the Marxist State will extinguish itself. I know that it cannot. Technique, power, education, capital—the State will never give them up
until it has murdered the individuality of its subjects. To the communist that discipline is an end in itself. To me all compul­sion is evil. And any tactics which weaken the State are
justifiable.’

‘Including, of course, war,’ I said, as if it were a foregone conclusion.’

‘A revolutionary must never forget that it is for the masses he works,’ Juan answered evasively. ‘So I cannot always agree with Bakunin that every act of destruction is good,
because it makes an intolerable world less bearable still.’

I dared not press him any further. When we parted, I still could not guess whether or not he shared the Secretariat’s policy and secrets. He expected from war the decisive destruction of
the State, but I felt he was by no means ready to fire the charge whatever the circumstances. It was his heart rather than his head, as Ashkar had implied, which made of him a natural leader.

As soon as I was home again, in those rooms and that garden haunted by Elisa, the faint hope aroused in me by Juan’s essen­tial humanity died away. I remembered that the most merciless
fanatics of history had often been persons of blameless life and considerable personal charm. In the worst hours of self-pity I cried out that Kasr-el-Sittat had no effective enemy in the world but
me. It may have been true. The enemies of the cover organizations in Russia, in America, in Western Europe, were legion, but I doubt if any chief of police shared my vision; each must have thought
that he was fighting, or merely watching a vague opposition to his own particular form of government.

I can imagine a common-sense jury of my countrymen asking me why I did not tell to some responsible agent or official what I had discovered. The answer is that I did—and the interview was
a desert of futility such as only these all-withering years of the twentieth century could have created.

I went to the most sensible of our consuls, a man who really knew the country and gathered intelligence that was by no means wholly commercial. For that reason I will not say in which Levantine
city he carried on his patriotic business. I told him that Kasr-el-Sittat was more than a mere colony of impractical anarchists.

‘I know it is,’ he said, with lift of his voice on the last word that rebuked me for my interference.

‘I thought you might know.’ I answered. ‘But my information is that their agents don’t only work behind the Iron Curtain.’

‘Quite probable, Amberson,’ he agreed. ‘Quite likely. But we have no need to take all these crazy isms seriously. Whereas anything cheap that does some damage to the other
fellow is not to be despised.’

So loose a remark horrified me, and he saw it.

‘Believe me,’ he added apologetically, ‘anarchism is a hundred years out of date. The only anarchists to-day are old dyed-in-the-wool Tories, but they aren’t aware of
it—and they are hardly likely to see salvation in Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘You’re forgetting the power of propaganda,’ I replied. ‘Couldn’t they be made to see it?’

‘Not unless you called Anarchism the Royal Empire League of Freedom or somethin!’

I was shaken by this echo of Elisa’s irony. Royal Society for the Protection of Civil Rights had been her contemptuous pro­posal when I objected to the name of World Opposition.

I knew at once that I could never convince the consul, with­out witnesses or written evidence, that my whole report was not just hearsay and imagination. I had to keep to myself the story of
Urgin’s Coriolanos. That, doubtless, would have been investi­gated, but could never be proved; and when the indignant Czoldy had established his innocence, Gisorius would soon arrange a
fatal accident for me.

I told the consul that I was entirely satisfied, and asked him—on the grounds that Kasr-el-Sittat was a good customer of mine—not mention my visit. He assured me, with an
unnecessarily patronizing air, that he wouldn’t even bother to make a note of what I said, and advised me not to become so provincial in my little corner that I began to believe in Syrian
bogey stories. He added, to gild the pill, that he would always be very grateful for any information on Arab politics in Tripoli. I never went near officials again.

2

I had taken what action I could, and as the weeks passed and the mutual insults at the Paris Conference were no more dis­courteous than usual, I sank into a dullness of spirit that was
almost peace. In such a mood the guilt of the Secretariat seemed to me less merely because their innocents had no part in it. I remembered that Tabas was still at Kasr-el-Sittat, which
proved—to my easy satisfaction—that he had seen nothing wrong. I clung to him, imagining his walks under the two cedars on the hilltop. I told myself that his insight was far more
penetrating than my petty collection of half-evidence and guesswork.

It was Sunday afternoon When Elisa and Gisorius turned up at El Mina. Gisorius only remained long enough for a drink, and then took the car back to Kasr-el-Sittat. Elisa told me that he was
staying at the colony on special business—an uneasy piece of news.

‘I wish that you liked each other better,’ she said. ‘You have never let him know you.’

‘Let him?’ I retorted. ‘Good God, why should he ask ques­tions? When I obey his orders, I don’t!’

‘What’s wrong, Eric?’ she asked, hearing the bitterness in my voice, and holding out to me her slim, brown hands.

‘Gisorius, perhaps.’

‘No! Why didn’t you tell me that you were in Aleppo last month?’

I said weakly that my business had been important, and that in dealing with Arabs one couldn’t limit oneself to a twelve-hour day.

‘But you should have come to Kasr-el-Sittat on your way back. Why not?’

I loved her so at that moment. What other woman would have shown no wounded pride, no jealousy of the unknown mood or person which had kept me from her? I suppose she knew with utter certainty
that I was neither weary of her nor unfaithful, and she was above the pettiness of inventing a griev­ance. Her smile and the tone of her why not? almost implied that I had not come to see her
because I had been suddenly and unaccountably shy.

And she was right, of course! Shyness, though so small a word, expressed in a sense my longing for her and my horror of her influence. She had laid over our love a patina beneath which, for her
own sake, she never dared to look, but in its black and gleaming surface she would often see my moods reflected, and I hers.

‘Have you heard any more of Poss?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘You knew he was the man who took me off the train into Turkey?’

I nodded. It was now her turn for shyness. She stood still and straight, and her skin became alive, absorbing light. I cannot call it a flush, for there was no redness.

‘What exactly did I say,’ she asked, ‘that evening in Damascus when I talked of my life?’

‘You made a physical shame of a spiritual one.’

This so pleased her that for the time she forgot Aleppo and our estrangement. Her straight body did not relax, but it lived, instantly, like a foil taken from the rack into a fencer’s
hand. Often I thought of her as an exquisite sword. No soft young girl, however slim, could have the flexibility of this woman in her thirties, stripped by the years down to the very essence of
beauty.

The twilight faded to darkness unperceived by us, and the house was still, so much more silent than the garden where leaf was ever stirring or water lapping—so silent that I knew our love,
whatever eternal agony might await it, was already in its tomb. Then I heard Boulos in the kitchen; and the wind off the sea, no longer welcome in late October, began to blow through the open
windows.

In the summer—dreaming, God help me, of such an evening as this!—I had built an open hearth and chimney in the living-room. I left Elisa, and while Boulos laid our meal I lit a fire.
It smoked, of course, abominably, and I was still struggling with stone-pine and drift-wood when she joined me. I gave her a cock­tail, and returned to my tongues of flame that were slowly
massing into one.

She stood over me, glass in hand, and again I felt that our sexes were reversed. In accepting service she was so like a man. The difference is only, I think, one of poise and bearing. A woman
accepts service admiringly and graciously, whereas a man accepts it with a shade of patronage. There is a suggestion in our very stance, when we watch a woman work, that we could do whatever she is
doing so much better if only we chose to bother. Or do I imagine that quality in Elisa, because it was I who felt the gentle and—in our early months of happines—the laughing humility
which is the prerogative of women?

When we sat down to Boulos’ array of dishes before the now obedient fire, Elisa was evidently satisfied that the cloud over our relationship had streamed away. She told me of the recent
development of Kasr-el-Sittat, of the frontier and of the Secre­tariat, and how she could never hope to dominate it unless Osterling was on her side. I remember my overwhelming desire to cry
out to her to stop, to let me know no more, to limit the bounds of my treachery. I drowned this intolerable sensitivity in draughts of white wine, so that I could return her look for look.

‘You
must
attend, Eric,’ she said at last. ‘Stop drinking and listen to me. I am trying to tell you that you are under suspicion.’

I answered that I had watched her preparing the way for that pronouncement, and that I couldn’t be bothered with it. Like an importunate woman I went round the table and kissed her. She
answered me with lips made vicious by annoyance.

‘No more,’ she ordered, taking the bottle and putting it on the floor by her side.

‘One glass,’ I begged—for, by God, I knew that I was going to need it.

I even knew what she was going to say, or, if that be an exaggeration, at least I knew she was going to talk of my friend­ship with Ashkar.

‘Do you remember meeting a man called Eugen Rosa?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘You must.’

‘But I met you the same evening, beloved.’

 ‘Eric, this is urgent. Be sane, my dear.’

‘What about him?’ I asked, and drank the glass she had allowed me.

‘He disappeared in Turkey on his way to Europe, and it seems certain that he got no further than the frontier.’

I told her that the frontier was stiff with bad characters on the Turkish side and ours, and that if Rosa had stopped for an earnest political chat with one of them, it might easily have been
his last.

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she answered. ‘He was carrying a box of cigars—for an interrogation—like those you took for Oliver Poss.’

‘Why worry?’ I said. ‘If anyone murdered Rosa and sold the cigars in Turkey, it will never be known where they came from.’

‘Yes. But we sent another box.’

‘That’s all right then.’

I listened to the blood pounding irregularly through my body, and thanked God for the wine which enabled me to blur all outlines so naturally that I neither condemned my treachery nor advanced
it.

‘Eric,’ she said, exasperated. ‘That second box didn’t arrive either. It had been changed somewhere for a box of ordinary Coriolanos.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because they were tested after one of them had failed to have any effect.’

‘Urgin slipped up, and gave you the wrong box?’

‘That’s what I hope,’ she answered. ‘These damned scientists are never as careful as they like to be thought. But the box was for a few minutes in Ashkar’s
hands.’