The Towers of Trebizond Page 18

  Chapter 17

  Where aunt Dot stayed in Jerusalem was in St. George's hostel, which was in the cloisters of the Anglican cathedral, so I went straight there and rode into the close and asked for a room. They had one, and they let me tie up the camel in the garden, where it immediately knelt down and went to sleep. I went into the hostel, and the first person I saw in it was my mother, whom I had last seen five years back in the Adriatic, when aunt Dot and I were trying to walk through the sea to Dalmatia, which we had to give up not because the sea was too deep, but because we had not got our passports on us, and my mother passed by in a motor launch with her protector, and stopped to talk to us, and gave us a lift back to the Italian shore. We were always pleased to meet one another, in a calm, unexcited way, and we were pleased now. She and her protector were staying with friends in Jerusalem, and had come to St. George's hostel to dine with Stewart Perowne, and to look at some objects (Corinthian) that he had lately dug up and planted in his little garden. The protector was quite rich, so I was glad to think that my financial worries would be solved.

  My mother was (indeed, is) rather large and plump; as she is also handsome, she faintly suggests a buxom goddess, who has perhaps been hatched from a good-sized swan's egg inspired by Zeus. She must have looked very well in the old days as a vicar's wife, carrying her children about in gardening baskets.

  She said, "Why, it's Laurie. My dear sweet child. But I thought you were in Turkey. Has there been any news of Dot? The English papers think she and that Father Pigg are busy spying."

  She had read about aunt Dot's disappearance in the papers, and had not, she said, been at all surprised, as Dot was always up to something. She herself was a more lethargic type, and, but for the natural energy and activity of her protector, would have been inclined to stay in one place, or drift about the world very slowly. By nature prolific, she had presented me with several half-brothers and sisters, by now good-sized and undergoing education. I told her there had been no news of aunt Dot, but that I had the camel.

  "Well, darling," she said, "the sooner you get rid of it the better. They are very treacherous. I hope you are going to settle down here now for some time and have a rest. I can give you money to fly home when you want to go. Or to Cyprus, with Howard and I."

  My mother is not common, but she has never been able to grasp grammar, or why it is wrong to talk about flying to Cyprus with I. I remember as a child my father disputing this point with her, but she could never understand, and went on saying it. She did not say "flying with I ", but if any one else was flying too, she thought that this put the first person singular into the nominative case, and that this was a rule of grammar, and not really odder than many other rules, for she had not got a grammatical mind.

  I said that, now I was so near it, I thought I had better go across into Israel before going home, as I would like to see the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth and the Palestine coast from Acre down to Askalon. She agreed that this was very beautiful.

  "But you must avoid Telaviv; it's a quite dreadful town. And all those little kibbutzes are tiresome." (My mother never liked hard, or indeed any other, work). "You'll enjoy Galilee. The bathing is delicious. And of course all those associations it has. Do you still go to church, darling?"

  "Sometimes. Not very much."

  "You should. Your father would have liked you to go. You'll have to see Jerusalem, of course. These nice Cathedral clergymen are so good at explaining it. We must drive out to Bethlehem one day; it's charming. What a shame for Dot to miss everything; she would enjoy it so. So would that old priest, of course. But really, trying to convert Turks—that was rather nonsense, wasn't it. We should all live and let live; it's much more sensible, as well as better manners. By the way, there's a young man staying here who knows you—David Langley. He has been writing articles about Turkey in one of the Sunday papers for some weeks; Stewart says they are quite good."

  So at dinner I met David again. He gave me a haunted look when I walked in to dinner, but rallied and became very affable and even obsequious, offering me the peas and passing me the condiments and asking very nicely after the camel and my journey. He could scarcely hope that no one would mention to me his Sunday paper articles, though he kept it off as long as he could, and changed the subject with powerful modesty quite soon. My mother showed them to me after dinner, and I saw that they were straight out of Charles's manuscript, as the first one had been, and I thought that this would be a very useful secret for me always to have, and that it was convenient to have an assiduous apprehensive friend who would see that I lacked for nothing which he could supply. He said he would show me the walls and gates and streets next day, which he did, and he knew so much about them that I grew rather confused and wished he had known less, and was glad to drive to Bethlehem in the afternoon with my mother, who knew nothing, except about the shops where they made jewellery and mother-of-pearl crosses and olive wood Bibles and velvet jackets embroidered with gold. Whenever my mother was in Bethlehem she got some of these jackets or tunics, and gave them to her friends and relations. She had a notion that all the New Testament women had shopped there, and that on the Sabbath they had all put on these velvet coats, and walked out in them, and she pictured all the Marys, that is, the Blessed Virgin, and Mary of Bethany, and Mary Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene (so unjustly defamed by posterity on no evidence), as well as Martha, and old Anna, and the woman taken in adultery, and the woman with the ointment who was a sinner, and all the other women, walking out in these black velvet coats embroidered with gold thread, and over their heads they wore shawls of black hand-made lace. This was the kind of thing my mother liked to imagine in Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago, and it really interested her much more than the Grotto of the Nativity and the church that Constantine had built over it. I liked the dark cavern glittering with silver lamps and gold and silver and tinsel ornaments and smoky incense fumes and tapestried walls, but this was not the kind of thing my mother liked, and I missed aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg. Bethlehem was charming and moving and strange, and one does not mind either there or in Jerusalem whether the shrines are rightly identified or not, because the faith of millions of pilgrims down the centuries has given them a mystical kind of reality, and one does not much mind their having been vulgarized, for this had to happen, people being vulgar and liking gaudy uneducated things round them when they pray; and one does not mind the original sites and buildings having been destroyed long ago and others built on their ruins and destroyed in their turn, again and again and again, for this shows the tenacious hold they have had on men's imaginations; they were dead but they would not lie down. Many people are troubled by the quarrels and the wars and the rivalries that raged for centuries round the Holy Sepulchre, between different sets of Christians; my mother, for instance, thought all this was a dreadful pity and disgrace, and that the whole history of the Christian Church was pretty shocking, and she liked to think that this was partly why she had left the Vicarage and my father, but really it was not this at all, but that she had grown bored and met someone else and preferred to rove about the world with him. Of course from one point of view she was right about the Church, which grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God, whom they have not yet grasped. And yet they had grasped something, so that the Church has always had great magnificence and much courage, and people have died for it in agony, which is supposed to balance all the other people who have had to die in agony because they d
id not accept it, and it has flowered up in learning and culture and beauty and art, to set against its darkness and incivility and obscurantism and barbarity and nonsense, and it has produced saints and martyrs and kindness and goodness, though these have also occurred freely outside it, and it is a wonderful and most extraordinary pageant of contradictions, and I, at least, want to be inside it, though it is foolishness to most of my friends.

  But what one feels in Jerusalem, where it all began, is the awful sadness and frustration and tragedy, and the great hope and triumph that sprang from it and still spring, in spite of everything we can do to spoil them with our cruelty and mean stupidity, and all the dark unchristened deeds of christened men. Jerusalem is a cruel, haunted city, like all ancient cities; it stands out because it crucified Christ; and because it was Christ we remember it with horror, but it also crucified thousands of other people, and wherever Rome (or indeed any one else) ruled, these ghastly deaths and torturings were enjoyed by all, that is, by all except the victims and those who loved them, and it is these, the crucifixions and the flayings and the burnings and the tearing to pieces and the floggings and the blindings and the throwing to the wild beasts, all the horrors of great pain that people thought out and enjoyed, which make history a dark pit full of serpents and terror, and out of this pit we were all dug, our roots are deep in it, and still it goes on, though all the time gradually less.

  And out of this ghastliness of cruelty and pain in Jerusalem on what we call Good Friday there sprang this Church that we have, and it inherited all that cruelty, which went on fighting against the love and goodness which it had inherited too, and they are still fighting, but sometimes it seems a losing battle for the love and goodness, though they never quite go under and never can. And all of this grief and sadness and failure and defeat make Jerusalem heartbreaking for Christians, and perhaps for Jews, who so often have been massacred there by Christians, though it is more beautiful than one imagines before one sees it, and full of interest in every street, and the hills stand round it brooding.

  The Arabs stand round it too, refugees from Palestine and living in camps, and they are brooding also, and the United Nations and the Refugee committees feed and clothe them and try to distract their minds, but still they brood and hate, like a sullen army beleaguering a city, and are sedentes in tenebris because they cannot go home.

  On the evening after I had seen the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and was still feeling bemused by its complicated extraordinariness, which is like nothing else in this world, I sat in the cathedral cloisters, rather tired and a little drunk, and David came and sat down by me, and he was a little drunk too, and more than I was.

  He said, "How did the Sepulchre church strike you? I mean, some people can't stand all that ornateness and tawdry glitter in the chapels, and some people are shocked at the squabblings between the different Churches over their different chapels—Latin and Greek and Syrian and Coptic and Abyssinian and Armenian and the rest, all fighting for position through the centuries and despising each other like hell. Lots of Christians are shocked at that. Were you?"

  "No, I liked it. It's just church manners; I'm used to them. It's only lately that Churches have even begun to think of being at all eirenical. And I like the glitter, too. The Armenian chapel is the best, with all those coloured witch balls and jewels and baubles and silver and candles; it's like an Aladdin's cave. The Greek one is pretty fine, too; it has the most incense and the best mosaics, and what look like the most valuable candlesticks and chalice. The Franciscans seem rather drab."

  "So you think churches should be flashy?"

  "Well, I like them flashy myself. Either flashy, or nobly built and austere. There's no room for noble building in the Sepulchre church, so they must glitter and shine. Like that little San Roque church in Lisbon."

  "Of course you believe in the Church, don't you; I keep forgetting that. Tell me, Laurie, do you really? Believe it, I mean? It seems so fantastic."

  "It is fantastic. Why not? I like fantastic things. Believe it? What does believe mean? You don't know, I don't know. So I believe what I want. Anyhow, it's in the blood; I probably can't help it."

  "As to that, it's in all our bloods. But we don't all believe it. It's very odd, you'll admit. A Church that started up out of a Jewish sect in Palestine nearly two thousand years ago, spread by Jewish missionaries, catching on in the east and west, expanding into this extraordinary business with a hierarchy and elaborate doctrines and worship, growing into something entirely unlike what its founders can have dreamed of at first, claiming to be in communion with God, who was this young Jew in Palestine . . . Well, I ask you."

  I said, "It's no good your asking me anything. I haven't got the answers. Go and ask the Bishop. Actually, I'm pretty sleepy. But you've left out most of it. You should read some of the liturgies and missals. Especially the Greek. Sophia, divine wisdom, O Sapientia, fortiter sauviterque disponent omnia, veni ad docendum nos. And light. O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol justitiae, veni et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis. The light of the spirit, the light that has lighted every man who came into the world. What I mean is, it wasn't only what happened in Palestine two thousand years ago, it wasn't just local and temporal and personal, it's the other kingdom, it's the courts of God, get into them however you can and stay in them if you can, only one can't. But don't worry me about the Jewish Church in Palestine, or the doings of the Christian Church ever since; it's mostly irrelevant to what matters."

  David remembered then that he was appeasing me. He said, "Don't mind me. You believers may be right, for all I know. All I say is, it's damned odd. You can't deny that it's pretty damned odd."

  I agreed that it was pretty damned odd, and I had never tried to say it wasn't.

  "Well," said David, still appeasing me. "I'll get us some drinks," and he went inside to get these, and I sat on in the cloister, hearing the cicadas chirp hoarsely in the garden and seeing the moon rise up among enormous stars, and agreeing that the Church was pretty damned odd, and I had really had quite enough drinks, for presently I dropped to sleep, and all those gaudy jewelled chapels shimmered through my dreams, and the cicadas sawing away in the warm scented garden became hoarse chanting among drifts of incense, and nothing seemed odd any more.

  Then, between sleeping and waking, there rose before me a vision of Trebizond: not Trebizond as I had seen it, but the Trebizond of the world's dreams, of my own dreams, shining towers and domes shimmering on a far horizon, yet close at hand, luminously enspelled in the most fantastic unreality, yet the only reality, a walled and gated city, magic and mystical, standing beyond my reach yet I had to be inside, an alien wanderer yet at home, held in the magical enchantment; and at its heart, at the secret heart of the city and the legend and the glory in which I was caught and held, there was some pattern that I could not unravel, some hard core that I could not make my own, and, seeing the pattern and the hard core enshrined within the walls, I turned back from the city and stood outside it, expelled in mortal grief.

  I was woken by my mother coming out and saying, "My dearest child, the mosquitoes, you'll be eaten up."

  Chapter 18

  I spent a week more in Jerusalem, and after that I was going to cross the Great Divide from whose bourne no traveller returns except with immense cunning and difficulty, and make my way to Haifa to get a ship to Istanbul. In Istanbul I would visit the British Embassy and find out if they had any news, and if there was anything that could be done, and I would also see Halide. I could not book my sailing till I crossed over to the Israel side, and I did not know when a ship that took camels would sail. Meanwhile I went on exploring Jerusalem and the country round it, often driving about with my mother. We drove one afternoon to what she called "the house of those nice Bethany people" and she made it sound like paying a social call in the country. She liked to picture those two good sisters and their brother; Martha, so busy and bustling and hospitable, doing all the work, Mary, whom I always thought ra
ther selfish, choosing the better part and sitting listening, and then getting praised for it, which never seemed to me fair, when listening must have been so much more pleasant and interesting than helping in the kitchen; and Lazarus somewhere in the olive garden seeing to the trees and goats, and Christ arriving for supper, and talking so that Mary could not tear herself away, even for a moment. I wondered what he had been saying that evening. Always when I read the Gospels I wonder what was really said, how far the evangelists had got it right, and how much they left out, writing it down long; after, and some of the things they forgot and left out might have been very important, and some of the things they put in they perhaps got wrong, for some sound unlikely for him to have said. And that is a vexation about the Gospels, you cannot be sure what was said, unless you are a fundamentalist and must believe every word, or have an infallible Church. Anglicans have less certainty but more scope, and can use their imaginations more. My father, however, used to say that we must not pick and choose and invent, for where would that end? We had to take it or leave it, my father would say, and Father Chantry-Pigg said the same, but that is where the clergy make a mistake, for there is no need to be so drastic, and few things are ever put down quite right, even at the time.