In the other room they were talking politely of world politics and the situation in Germany. Nessim had perched himself gracefully on Pordre’s chair. Pombal was swallowing yawns which kept returning distressingly enough in the form of belches. My mind was still full of Melissa. I had sent her some money that afternoon and the thought of her buying herself some fine clothes — or even spending it in some foolish way — warmed me. ‘Money’ Pombal was saying playfully to an elderly woman who had the appearance of a contrite camel. ‘One should always make sure of a supply. For only with money can one make more money. Madame certainly knows the Arabic proverb which says: “Riches can buy riches, but poverty will scarcely buy one a leper’s kiss.”’
‘We must go’ said Justine, and staring into her warm dark eyes as I said good-bye I knew that she divined how fall of Melissa my mind was at the moment; it gave her handshake an added warmth and sympathy.
I suppose it was that night, while she was dressing for dinner that Nessim came into her room and addressed her reflection in the spade-shaped mirror. ‘Justine’ he said firmly, ‘I must ask you not to think that I am going mad or anything like that but — has Balthazar ever been more than a friend to you?’ Justine was placing a cigale made of gold on the lobe of her left ear; she looked up at him for a long second before answering in the same level, equable tone: ‘No, my dear.’
‘Thank you.’
Nessim stared at his own reflection for a long time, boldly, comprehensively. Then he sighed once and took from the waistcoat-pocket of his dress-clothes a little gold key, in the form of an ankh. ‘I simply cannot think how this came into my possession’ he said, blushing deeply and holding it up for her to see. It was the little watch-key whose loss had caused Balthazar so much concern. Justine stared at it and then at her husband with a somewhat startled air. ‘Where was it?’ she said.
‘In my stud-box.’
Justine went on with her toilette at a slower pace, looking curiously at her husband who for his part went on studying his own features with the same deliberate rational scrutiny. ‘I must find a way of returning it to him. Perhaps he dropped it at a meeting. But the strange thing is….’ He sighed again. ‘I don’t remember.’ It was clear to them both that he had stolen it. Nessim turned on his heel and said: ‘I shall wait for you downstairs.’ As the door closed softly behind him Justine examined the little key with curiosity.
* * * * *
At this time he had already begun to experience that great cycle of historical dreams which now replaced the dreams of his childhood in his mind, and into which the City now threw itself — as if at last it had found a responsive subject through which to express the collective desires, the collective wishes, which informed its culture. He would wake to see the towers and minarets printed on the exhausted, dust-powdered sky, and see as if en montage on them the giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and guide: indeed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of place.
These disturbed him for they were not at all the dreams of the night-hours. They overlapped reality and interrupted his waking mind as if the membrane of his consciousness had been suddenly torn in places to admit them.
Side by side with these giant constructions — Palladian galleries of images drawn from his reading and meditation on his own past and the city’s — there came sharper and sharper attacks of unreasoning hatred against the very Justine he had so seldom known, the comforting friend and devoted lover. They were of brief duration but of such fierceness that, rightly regarding them as the obverse of the love he felt for her, he began to fear not for her safety but for his own. He became afraid of shaving in the sterile white bathroom every morning. Often the little barber noticed tears in the eyes of his subject as he noiselessly spread the white apron over him.
But while the gallery of historical dreams held the foreground of his mind the figures of his friends and acquaintances, palpable and real, walked backwards and forwards among them, among the ruins of classical Alexandria, inhabiting an amazing historical space-time as living personages. Laboriously, like an actuary’s clerk he recorded all he saw and felt in his diaries, ordering the impassive Selim to type them out.
He saw the Mouseion, for example, with its sulky, heavily-subsidized artists working to a mental fashion-plate of its founders: and later among the solitaries and wise men the philosopher, patiently wishing the world into a special private state useless to anyone but himself — for at each stage of development each man resumes the whole universe and makes it suitable to his own inner nature: while each thinker, each thought fecundates the whole universe anew.
The inscriptions on the marbles of the Museum murmured to him as he passed like moving lips. Balthazar and Justine were there waiting for him. He had come to meet them, dazzled by the moonlight and drenching shadow of the colonnades. He could hear their voices in the darkness and thought, as he gave the low whistle which Justine would always recognize as his: ‘It is mentally vulgar to spend one’s time being so certain of first principles as Balthazar is.’ He heard the elder man saying: ‘And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behaviour.’
He walked slowly down through the arches towards them. The marble stones were barred with moonlight and shadow like a zebra. They were sitting on a marble sarcophagus-lid while somewhere in the remorseless darkness of the outer court someone was walking up and down on the springy turf lazily whistling a phrase from an aria of Donizetti. The gold cigales at Justine’s ears transformed her at once into a projection from one of his dreams and indeed he saw them both dressed vaguely in robes carved heavily of moonlight. Balthazar in a voice tortured by the paradox which lies at the heart of all religion was saying: ‘Of course in one sense even to preach the gospel is evil. This is one of the absurdities of human logic. At least it is not the gospel but the preaching which involves us with the powers of darkness. That is why the Cabal is so good for us; it posits nothing beyond a science of Right Attention.’
They had made room for him on their marble perch but here again, before he could reach them the fulcrum of his vision was disturbed and other scenes gravely intervened, disregarding congruence and period, disregarding historic time and common probability.
He saw so clearly the shrine the infantry built to Aphrodite of the Pigeons on that desolate alluvial coast. They were hungry. The march had driven them all to extremities, sharpening the vision of death which inhabits the soldier’s soul until it shone before them with an unbearable exactness and magnificence. Baggage-animals dying for lack of fodder and men for lack of water. They dared not pause at the poisoned spring and wells. The wild asses, loitering so exasperatingly just out of bowshot, maddened them with the promise of meat they would never secure as the column evolved across the sparse vegetation of that thorny coast. They were supposed to be marching upon the city despite the omens. The infantry marched in undress though they knew it to be madness. Their weapons followed them in carts which were always lagging. The column left behind it the sour smell of unwashed bodies — sweat and the stale of oxen: Macedonian slingers-of-the-line farting like goats.