THE LITTLE TRIBUNAL OF THE DUSK
Shadows, shadows, voices from otherwhen, faces from time lost, said the dusk. Do you remember the maze near Bicester and whom you walked it with? Do you remember the Cairn o’Mount Road over the Grampians, the tawny owl in the grey afternoon? And Portknockie? Do you remember the boat in the rain? Do you remember St-Paul-de-Vence and Kensington Square? Do you remember the olive tree? Do you remember, do you remember?
Yes, I said, I remember everything because this is
THE DUSK VS ME
How do you find? said the dusk.
Guilty, I said.
The universe, hissed the dusk as python, as ambience, as tribunal, is a continually fluctuating event that configures itself to whatever is perceived as centre.
I turned to the Vermeer girl, I looked at the colour plates in the books and the big print over the fireplace. She wasn’t there, the virtue had gone out of my poor copies, they were empty of her. The room filled up with a desolation that drained the virtue out of everything. All of the colour and accumulated detail of books and pictures, posters, puppets and art objects, charts and maps and Chinese kites, all the comradely clutter of shortwave radio and tape recorders, computer and printer, all the things on my desk, the stones from places of power, shrivelled oak leaves and dry acorns from favouring trees, shells from memory’s store of sunlit ocean (some of them broken and revealing mystical helices), the little china cat that played with a golden ball, the pensive bisque mermaid from a forgotten aquarium (Luise had given me both of those), the sombre broken-nosed painted lion (relic of some cast-iron peaceable kingdom) — everything in the room, the colour and pattern of Oriental carpets and cushions and furniture until now harmoniously sharing territories of light and shadow — all of it stopped looking right and began to look wrong.
It was after closing time. From the footpath along the common came shouts and drunken singing where jackals and hyenas prowled the wastes and the satyr cried to his fellows. This was only Saturday night; there was still Sunday to get through.
In the morning as always the Sunday Times and the Observer slid through the letterbox and flopped grunting to the floor, their review sections and supplements heavy with news of Juan de Fulmé, Boumboume Letunga, Jarvis Bendable, Charmian Rox, and every other writer who was not Herman Orff. I got through the day by answering letters and paying bills, my regular Sunday refuge.
In the evening I looked for the Vermeer girl again in the print over the fireplace and in the books and again she wasn’t there. ‘Why aren’t you there?’ I said to her. ‘What have I done to make you go away? Where have you gone?’
No answer.
‘You’ve always been here,’ I said. ‘How am I supposed to get along without you?’
Still no answer.
‘Listen,’ I said to the radio, ‘give me her voice at least.’ It was tuned to 7320 kHz, in the twittering and tweetling of the vast hollow aerial miles a soprano was singing Tales from the Vienna Woods in Russian. Desolate, those woods. Radio Moscow began to fade, and scarcely had I touched the tuning dial when a new voice came in, a girlish voice as fresh and clear as the run of spring water over clean stones. It was a presenter I hadn’t heard before, reading the news on Radio Tirana’s German transmission on 7310 kHz. I was caught by her brilliant simplicity; her speech was wholly unmannered, wholly uncovered, it came out of her with her breath and there was in it a fragrance as of her breath and an incandescent eroticism. She read the news like a schoolgirl standing up straight with her feet together, her voice dancing a little with the enjoyment of its own physicality.
She spoke of Amerikanischer Imperialismus enchantingly and unmaliciously, and she finished each news item with a rising inflection in which one could hear her tidy small pleasure. Her voice made in the crackling and whispering of the evening airwaves a quiet place of its own. Knowing hardly any German I was able to let go of all comprehension so that she came to my ear naked, giving me, unvitiated by any surface meaning, the sound that signified only herself. Whenever she paused for breath I was shocked by the intimacy of it. It was just such a voice as the Vermeer girl might have spoken with.
Still listening to her I put on a videotape of a Channel 4 film of a tidal mangrove forest in Borneo and the crabs with bodies like human faces. I ran it with the sound off. The moon rose over the sea and the voice of the girl from Tirana moved with the spring tide that flooded the mangroves as the great female crab silently exploded her fertility into the sea, clouds of infant ancient faces rising around her. The German faded out, the sweet voice was itself only, beckoning wordlessly in the moving waters under the moon.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What are you saying?’
Come and find me, said the Vermeer girl.
13 The Hague
Liverpool Street at night is a darkling place; it darkles. Out of the dimness stare the red and yellow illuminated signs of the JAZZ BUFFET AND BAR, of CIGARETTES AND SWEETS. In the dimness under the fluorescent lights at the ticket barriers travellers manifest themselves halfway between chiaroscuro and silhouette. There is a general echoing of rattling and rumbling, there is a dark and stertorous clamour. The Harwich train will leave at 1940 from Platform 9.
I’d gone to Orpheus Travel in the Fulham Road but it was shut down; BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, said a sign on the window. Behind the window there were only scattered papers on a dusty floor. I bought my ticket at Thomas Cook in Harrods.
As the train pulled out I was astonished to see how many illuminated clockfaces looked out of the station into the night. I didn’t count them; I was strongly satisfied by them, that in the hurrying past of the uncelebrated moment these heralds were yet present to trumpet silently with their luminous faces all departures, all arrivals.
The train wheels, now authorized to take up their song of distance, clacked and clattered their traditional shanty of miles. The unseen boat not yet arrived at, the dark sea waiting, these already lent significance to the travellers on our train; everyone looked interesting.
An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of a night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.
Consider this, said the train wheels, repeating the message tirelessly moment after moment on the miles of cold iron that lay shining in the dark that led to Harwich and repeating face on face the faces reflected in the windows. Harwich achieved, the windows became empty of faces.
Signs pointed to LADIES, GENTLEMEN, SHIPS. My passport was stamped; with the other seagoers I went up an escalator and along a glassed-in passageway from which we could see the hinged shell of the stern of the Prinses Beatrix lifted to receive a stream of cars.
Having climbed the gangway and been directed by stewards to our cabins we then moved haltingly on such stairways as offered until the number on a door matched the number on a piece of paper in one’s hand. People stood in little knots of bafflement, then disappeared.
In a little while I reappeared in the self-service restaurant, sitting at a table with my notebook, a ham sandwich, and a bottle of beer. An illuminated clock on the quayside looked in through the glassed-in side of the restaurant. The glass was steamed up and dropleted, and on this misty surface appeared a show of moving quayside shadows as the ship cast off its moorings and eased out into the North Sea. In the bright light of the restaurant people ate and drank as the geometric shadows stroked past on the whiteness of the foggy glass.