‘Political secrets are not powerless, in any form,’ he said.
‘But the tension and danger around them, one can make them evaporate. You’re an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It’s in the bones and sediment.’
‘It’s in character and nuance and mood.’
‘That is what governs us in our lives, that’s not the truth.’
‘For the living it is the truth,’ he quietly said.
‘Why did you get into such a business?’
‘I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there’s a story.’
‘A secret.’
‘Yes, a secret… I was selected to go and study in China. I was there a year. And all I saw of China was this one area about the size of a pasture. I didn’t go anywhere else. That’s where I stayed and where I worked. Villagers had been cleaning a hillock and had come across earth of a different colour. Something that simple, but teams of archaeologists came. Under the different-coloured grey earth they found stone slabs, under these they found timbers-huge timbers that had been cut and stripped and nestled together like a great floor in some mead hall. Only of course, it was a ceiling.
‘So it was, as I said, like an exercise in a dream where you are made to go deeper and further. They brought in cranes to lift the timbers out and underneath them they discovered water-a water tomb. Three giant pools. Floating there was a lacquered coffin of an ancient ruler. Also in the water were coffins with the bodies of twenty female musicians along with their instruments. They were to accompany him, you see. With zithers, flutes, panpipes, drums, iron bells. They were delivering him to his ancestors. When they removed the skeletons from the coffins and laid them out there was no damage to any of the bones to reveal how the musicians had been killed, not one fractured bone.’
‘Then they were strangled,’ Anil said.
‘Yes. That’s what we were told.’
‘Or suffocated. Or poisoned. A study of the bones could have told you the truth. I don’t know if there was a tradition of poisoning in China at that time. When was it?’
‘Fifth century B.C.’
‘Yeah, they knew poisons.’
‘We soaked the lacquered coffins with polymer so they wouldn’t collapse. The lacquer had been made out of sumac sap mixed with coloured pigments. Hundreds of layers of it. Then they discovered the musical instruments. Drums. Mouth organs made from gourds. Chinese zithers! Most of all-bells.
‘By now historians had arrived too. Taoist and Confucian scholars, specialists in musical chimes. We pulled sixty-four bells up out of the water. Till now no instruments from this period had been found, though it was known that music had been the most significant activity and idea of this civilization. So you would beburied not with your wealth but alongside music. The great bells removed from the water turned out to have been made with the most sophisticated techniques. It seemed each region of the country had its own method of bell-making. In those regions there had been, literally, wars of music…
‘Nothing was as important. Music was not entertainment, it was a link with ancestors who had led us here, it was a moral and spiritual force. The experience of breaking through barriers of slate, wood, water, to discover a buried women’s orchestra had a similar mystical logic to it, do you understand? You must understand their state of acceptance somehow of such a death. The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.
‘Before I left they had an event where everyone who had worked there came to hear the bells being struck. It was at the end of my year. It took place in the evening and, as we listened, we felt them physically, lifting into the darkness. Each bell had two notes to represent the two sides of the spirit, containing a balance of opposing forces. Possibly it was those bells that made me an archaeologist.’
‘Twenty murdered women.’
‘It was another world with its own value system that came to the surface.’
‘Love me, love my orchestra. You can take it with you! That kind of madness lies within the structure of all civilizations, not just in distant cultures. You boys are sentimental. Death and glory. A guy I know fell in love with me because of my laugh. We hadn’t even met or been in the same room, he’d heard me on a tape.’
‘And?’
‘Oh, he swooned over me like a married man, made me fall in love with him. You’ve heard the story. How smart women become idiots, ignore everything they should keep on knowing. By the end I wasn’t laughing too much. No bell-ringing.’
‘Was he in love with you before he met you, do you think?’
‘Well, that’s interesting. Perhaps it was the habit of my voice. I think he’d listened to the tape two or three times. He was a writer. A writer. They have time to get into trouble. I had been asked to chair a talk at a conference given by a teacher of mine, Larry Angel. A lovely, funny man, so I was in fact laughing a lot at the way he thought and put things together with his nonlinear mind. We were onstage sitting at a table and I introduced him, and I guess my microphone was on and I was chuckling as he gave the lecture. The old guy and I always had a good rapport. Favourite-uncle atmosphere, slightly sexual but definitely platonic.
‘I guess the writer, my eventual friend, also had a nonlinear mind, so he was getting the jokes. He had ordered the tape because he was interested in researching burial mounds or something, a rather serious subject, and he wanted information, and details. That was our meeting. In proxy. Not a big moment across the universe… We were on a high wire for three years during our relationship.’
Their first adventure together: Anil drove her unwashed white car that smelled of mildew to a Sri Lankan restaurant. It was just a few months after Cullis had heard her on the tape. They were driving through early-evening traffic.
‘So. Are you famous?’
‘No.’ He laughed.
‘A little?’
‘I’d say about seventy people who are not relatives or friends would recognize my name.’
‘Even here?’
‘I doubt it. Who knows. What is it, Muswell Hill?’
‘Archway.’
She opened the window and yelled.
‘Hey, listen, everybody-I’ve got the science writer Cullis Wright in my car! Or is it Cullis Wrong? Yes, it’s him! He’s with me today!’
‘Thank you.’
She rolled up the window. ‘We can check the gossips tomorrow, to see if you were busted.’ She rolled down the window and this time used the horn to gain attention. They were stuck in traffic anyway. Maybe from a distance it looked like a fight. An angry woman half out of the car gesturing towards someone within, trying to get passersby on her side.
He nestled back into the passenger’s seat, watching her loose energy, the ease with which she swept her skirt up to her knees and leapt out of the car once more after pulling the hand brake with a grunt. She was now waving her arms, banging on the dirty roof of the car.
He would remember other moments like this later-times when she tried to strip off his carefulness, tried to unbuckle his worried glance. Making him dance on one of the dark streets of Europe to a small cassette player she pressed against his ear. ‘ Brazil.’ Remember this song. He sang the words with her on that Paris street, their feet dancing over the painted outline of a dog.
He sat there, pressed against the back of his car seat, traffic all around him, watching her torso through the car door as she yelped and pounded on the roof. He felt he had been encased in ice or metal and she was banging on its surface in order to reach him, in order to let him out. The energy of her swirling clothes, the wild grin as she entered the car again and kissed him-she could have broken him free. But as a married man he had already pawned his heart.