Daniel Martin (80 page)

Something in him did see, or was later to see, that the very perception of this was in itself a crystal, and of the kind that profoundly structures all narrative art; without which it collapses both internally and externally. But that night it seemed one more proof of how determined he was.

He drained his Scotch and stood abruptly. As he passed the two girls on his way out, the one facing him turned with an unlighted cigarette, with an obviousness that he met with a contemptuous cold grey stab of the eyes, like a sliver of steel; and stalked on. But if there had been witnesses upstairs, none would have realized that he had left the bar determined to have it out with Jane. When it came to it he walked past her door without a glance, not even the faintest hesitation, and went into his own carpeted, luxurious and inhuman cell; then locked its door.

At least the monk without a faith, or indeed even a monastery, slept better, and the weather, when the desk woke him by telephone, seemed to favour their trip: a blue window and sunshine, the spring-like air of the winter Mediterranean. Soon after eight they were heading north out of the city, and in unexpected comfort—a nearly new Chevrolet, an easy-mannered young driver. He had chestnut hair, not at all a Levantine face; he was a Maronite Christian, he explained in an English that kept stumbling, if not stopping, for lack of grammar and words. But it soon emerged that his real religion was the machine he was sitting in. He drove at a speed that made even Dan, not a particularly patient driver himself, catch his breath a few times. But the young man negotiated several at first sight rash attempts to overtake with a casual nonchalance. He clearly knew how to handle his chariot and after a while they grew hardened to his hatred of being made to wait by anything ahead. His garrulity, and curiosity about them, helped as well; and the new landscapes.

They were on the coast road to Tripoli in the north of the country. For many miles the littoral had been ruined by uncontrolled development, like the South of France, certain parts of California. But the sea was a deep, fierce blue, and inland, to their right, ran the long range of snow-covered mountains that spines the Lebanon. Past Byblos, the country grew wilder. The road ran under boulder-strewn hillsides; below, over the vivid water, lay dazzlingly white rectangular saltpans.

After a while they had to travel more slowly, since the road narrowed and there were far fewer places to overtake: for minutes on end the red-haired driver would slowly tap his hand on the wheel. It was all the government’s fault, they talked about tourism but they wouldn’t build proper roads—he had a brother working for Volkswagen in Germany and had stayed on holiday with him, he knew what proper roads were.

Risking the young man’s eyes in the driving-mirror, able to combine at least against this, Dan and Jane exchanged one or two covert glances: the sad innocence of backward countries. They were also warned about Syrian roads, that they were going into ‘a place where all is crazy, crazy people’—mainly crazy, it seemed, because they had no money under the Baathist regime. Labib liked driving customers there. ‘It make me so happy when I leave.’ And he grinned back at them, pleased at this wit. Dan gave Jane a dry little inquiring tilt of the head, and she smiled guardedly. Perhaps, she suggested politely, ordinary people were better looked after now? A dismissive hand waved back.

‘Fool people. You will see. Not know what is money.’

They gave up trying to convert this evident storm-trooper for laissez-faire capitalism. He switched on the radio and the car was filled with folk-sound. He fiddled for ‘American music’, but they made him return to the original wavelength: a woman’s voice, sinuous, alternately sobbing and languorous, against a plangent rhythm. She was famous, they were told.

‘Every man in Middle East like for wife. Even Israel men.’

They sounded him discreetly there, without need. He was happy to air his views. Though he was pro-Arab, he seemed to have a grudging admiration for the Israelis, and very little sympathy for the Palestine refugees. They were stupid people, lazy people; like the Syrians.

‘I no have money, I no have work, so I much better man than you.’

And again he waved his slack-wristed hand back over his shoulder at them, eyes on the road. It was a gesture they were to become very familiar with: the supreme asininity of the human species in allowing so many things to keep a man from making money. He was strange: both crass and open, and finally rather likeable.

They by-passed Tripoli, then turned inland. Dour uplands began to rise ahead, and banks of cloud. They came to the frontier in the last sun. Dan handed over their passports and some money and Labib disappeared inside the customs office; ten minutes later he reappeared with two men in uniform, who came and stared at Dan and Jane. Some kind of argument was going on. There was a hostility, an indifference in the soldiers’ eyes, that somehow chilled.

The senior finally spat some word and turned away. It seemed, when Labib climbed back in and explained, it was nothing to do with them, but with some minor infraction of regulations he had committed on another trip a month before. He seethed with resentment over it for several miles, like some innocent landed in the middle of a Kafka novel. He claimed the soldiers simply wanted a bribe, as in the good old days; were afraid to ask for it, and took their frustration out on him.

Meanwhile, they were climbing under heavy cloud. The country got bleakly grim. They seemed in twenty miles to have jumped twenty degrees in latitude—into Scotland, or Scandinavia. One or two miserable villages squatted in desolate glens. A thin drizzle started, and the grey cloud pressed lower as they went on. The volatile Labib grew equally gloomy. He didn’t think the cloud would lift. It was a bad time of year. He also had to drive with more care; there was very little traffic, but a fellow-driver had broken his suspension in a pothole only a week before.

They branched off, past the townlet of Tell Kalakh, for the Krak des Chevaliers. It loomed, a gaunt grey-blue, six miles away across a wintry plain; a formidable and forbidding catafalque of a castle that seemed tilted and sliding off its steep hilltop. They skirted the plain, through villages that recalled, in their poverty, if not their climate, Egypt… or medieval England, perhaps. There must have been a lot of rain recently, there was mud everywhere. Men in baggy black trousers, muffled in their chequered kufiyas, mere pairs of hostile eyes, watched them pass. There seemed no children, no hope; a world the rest of the world had forgotten, as far from the glitter of Beirut as the landscapes of the moon. Then the road wound endlessly up over bare, wind-scorched slopes, with runnels of water everywhere, towards the louring Crusader stronghold. For the first time that day Dan felt happier. All this suited his mood. It seemed almost a welcome reality after the last twenty-four hours.

They arrived at the bottom gate of the immense fortress in an icy spatter of driving sleet. By the foot of the wall beside them there were cushions of unthawed snow. Luckily Assad’s sister-in-law had warned Dan it would be cold, and they had brought what warm clothes they had. Jane pulled on a cardigan, Dan a sweater, then jackets and overcoats again. They followed Labib up through a long tunnel. The roof dripped water, the wind moaned, there was a dankness everywhere, one almost expected to see the Thane of Glaniis stand out. Instead, a resigned Arab in an ancient black overcoat came from a boarded-up recess at the foot of the inner wall. Their guide, he spoke a tired, guttural French.

Labib disappeared, and they followed the man and his monotonous voice through a maze of underground stables, stores, magazines, kitchens, corridors; stared down over sombre grey distances from occasional windows… and gradually, despite the cold and the wind and the desolation, felt their visit was worthwhile. It was the size of the place; its weight, its stupefying unnecessity, like that of the Pyramids; and, on the upper levels, the still sensible ghost of thirteenth-century elegance, the ruined stairways and delicately columned arches and terraced courtyards, its theatricality there appealed to both of them. On the highest battlements there were stupendous views. In one direction, back down towards the sea, they could even still see a countryside in sunshine. But to the north-west, where they were heading, there was nothing but endless cloud. They hardly listened any more to the guide; were far more conscious of a kind of quixotic English rightness in being at this monument to primitive power politics and human greed at this totally unsuitable time of year. Europe, our of gear since the beginning; one’s permanent inner exile from its endless historical errors. It drew them close again, outside their own situation, since it was what had been lacking down the Nile: there, always the obscuring presence of their fellow-passengers.

They ended in a merciful warmth, in a room at the foot of one of the dilapidated wall-towers; a blazing stove, a serving-boy, Labib smoking; and a small brass pot of Turkish coffee, very sweet but strong; the best, they decided at the first sip, they had tasted. It was somehow Russian, very primitive and simple, a station waiting-room from Tolstoy. Labib and their guide talked in Arabic, the boy stared solemnly at them. But then Labib caught Dan’s eye and tapped his watch. Dan glanced at his own, then grimaced at Jane as he prepared to stand.

‘You could just about have been sitting down to a delicious Italian meal you realize that?’

She did not answer, merely smiled. But a little later, when they were following Labib down a long flight of stone stairs to the lower levels and the tunnel out, she took his hand in her own gloved one and pressed it, without looking at him; kept it, until they got to the bottom of the flight; as if he must be good, like a bored child.

They drove back to the main road, then turned on for their next stop, the town of Horns. The route lay over long and treeless uplands, a barren and colour-drained moor. Solitary lapwings stood by mournful pools. The road rose now into the base of the clouds. A thin mist settled, cutting visibility down to a mile at most, less in places. Labib shook his head. He had heard of weather like this, but not met it before. It was very evident that it was getting worse. A motionless human figure loomed beside the road, holding out a dead bird with an outstretched arm. Dan glimpsed a flat bill, a spiral of red and green on the head.

‘What was it?’

‘A teal.’

He looked through the rear window. The man stared after them, the small duck still hanging from a disappointed outstretched hand.

Labib grinned round. ‘That is how they think business in Syria. I give you bird, you give me two packet cigarettes.’ The hand waved again. ‘Very stupid country.’

After a few moments Dan murmured, ‘I handpicked him specially.’

‘I suspected you had.’

He held her eyes. ‘Do you want to call it a day? I don’t like the look of this.’

‘Faint-heart.’

He smiled ahead through the driving-window. ‘Only thinking of you.’

‘Adventure. I’m enjoying it.’

But it began, as they came into Horns, to look more like the edge of a limbo nearest to a hell. It had started to rain. The town was awful in its feeling of ramshackle depression, of a society self-condemned to the utmost austerity. A drab greyness hung over everything: buildings, people, shops. They had expected a great contrast with the Lebanon; but this lacked even the individuality, the light, the laziness, the engaging humour of Egypt. Labib parked in the main square, carefully, opposite a restaurant window where he could watch his car while they ate. Hubcaps, even wheels, would be gone in five minutes if he did not do so; or so he claimed.

The restaurant owner was a Beiruti, and the meal adequate, but the shabby decor of the place reminded Dan of the British Restaurant days of immediate post-war England. They sat with Labib in the window. He could see Jane was unsettled by the sight outside of two great puritanisms, the Marxist and the Moslem, in joint practice; her eyes kept drifting out there, as if she were looking for some redeeming feature. There seemed to be many armed soldiers and army trucks about, which added a disagreeable air of enforced suppression to an already quite sufficient gloom. Dan observed her reaction with a kind of sour pleasure, wondering if she saw the parallel with the Krak des Chevaliers. This seemed to lack even the privileged graces for the few. He tried to discover more of political Syria from Labib, but the young man quickly shook his head and raised a finger.

‘Not talk here.’

It was like slipping back thirty years: Careless talk costs lives.

The Beiruti owner came up towards the end of the meal and chatted with Labib. He had heard there was fog on the road to Palmyra, still a hundred miles off across the desert. Traffic was getting through, but it was a slow business. They had a discussion. They couldn’t possibly get there before dark now; their visa was strictly for one night, which would give them only tomorrow morning to see the ruins. But having said that, Labib declared himself for going on. He could get them there. They sensed that his professional mettle and his beloved Chevrolet were challenged. It was almost as if the threatened mist stood for everything he despised about the country. Dan wanted to go on for his own reasons; and Jane seemed still in her adventurous mood. Now they had come so far… or perhaps it was to demonstrate that she would not take the present appearance of Syria for its only reality.

They settled the bill and moved off again. For ten miles or so, the mist seemed no worse. But then, as soon as they branched off on the un-metalled desert road to Palinyra, it thickened down to less than a hundred yards. On either side, the sand stretched a little way; then the grey wall of vapour. Labib strained forward now, searching the road for potholes, down to fifteen miles an hour in places. At one point he swerved off the road without warning and stopped, his alert eyes having seen headlights ahead. An army truck thundered past going a good deal faster than they had been. It was to happen several times more during that afternoon. Apparently the road was notorious for it, the army drivers didn’t care a damn; and however innocent the driver of the car they hit, he would have the blame.

After some miles, they passed a congregation of domed clay huts, white and mausoleum-like; seemingly devoid of life. Then after that, mile after crawling mile. They all grew silent, the enclosed solitude and the monotony grew hypnotic. The strip of desert beside them seemed like an ochreous snow. One turned and looked at the tiniest distraction; a stone marker, the skeleton of a dead sheep, a scatter of low bushes. It became far stranger than anything they had bargained for: a fog in a desert.