Ink (49 page)

I say that the boy who met me was an Arab but as he wound his way through the crowd, calling my name, bounding towards me like an over-excited pup, I could see that he was not pure Bedouin by blood, but rather a half-breed of some sort, his skin more coppery than the swarthy Arabs and his features more refined, a greyhound or gazelle in linen, white loose-fitting shirt and trousers. He reminded me of
[Carterpauses, pen held over the page]
you, Anna, actually, and I must confess, what with the disquieting nature of Samuel's letter and the scraps of notes sent with it, I rather felt myself overcome with foolish emotion for an instant. I'm sure now it was only that certain uncomfortable memories had been dredged up by this insane note of his, or that the heat and the fumes had got to me a bit, tired as I was by the long journey, but at the time, I have to be honest, something quite undefined but deeply disturbing struck me.

He pauses again.
I have to be honest.
The phrase strikes him as something of an irony in this ten-year-long letter of confession, now become a journal in its constant failure to ever actually confess, its endless digression into what he's done, and is doing now, and has still to do. He began it as an explanation of why he had not yet returned, but how he would, oh yes, of course, he would. Because he loved her, loves her still. He still believes that.

Anyway,
he writes
, the strangest thought occurred to me—that this was, in fact, a girl in boy's dress—before he reached me and I spotted the first wisps of beard on his chin. I am ashamed to say that I was clearly in a daze from all the hustle of the airfields, for he literally had to grab my sleeve and pull me to the side,
out of the streaming crowds, toward the corrugated-iron wall of a warehouse, where the mob was less bothersome.

The door creaks open and Carter looks up across the wide expanse of dusty wooden floorboards stretching lengthways down the attic studio toward the door boxed in a corner. The boy waves, smiling as he closes the door behind him.

“Tamuz,” he says. “I come from the
Eyn…
the Baron.”

Carter leans back against the corrugated iron, cap in one hand, the other raking fingers through his hair, squeezing the bridge of his nose. He squares the cap back on his head, stands up straight and looks at the lad. Can't be more than seventeen. Eyes darting to the pistol at Carter's hip and to the pips on his tunic, the cap. Carter smiles to himself, snaps a salute at the boy.

“Captain Jack Carter,” he says.

The boy beams a grin, gives a slapdash salute back, chest puffed out.

“This way, Carter Bey.”

“Lead on.”

The boy beckons him round the side of the warehouse building and toward the terminal, waving away the younger, smaller boys who would be yammering at Carter for money and attention without this native guide already in his service. It does make him cringe inside a little but the salute is a trick that always works. Sometimes a cigarette from a silver case works better, but it's the same principle; treat a young man as a soldier and he'll run round the world for you and back.

“I understood von Strann would meet me here himself,” says Carter.

“It is not good, not time,” the boy calls over his shoulder.

“But you're taking me to him, yes?”

“It is not good, not time,” says the boy.

“I need to see von Strann.”

Carter grabs him by the shoulder but the boy slips out of grasp and away, turning and stopping in his tracks. He seems to search for words of explanation, then remember something. Reaching inside his shirt, he draws out an envelope.

“From the Eyn,” he says.

As Carter reaches for the letter, the boy takes his hand and draws it in toward him, under his shirt, laying Carter's palm flat on his bare skin. Carter jerks his hand away but when he sees the hurt, offended look in the boy's expression, the curt comment he was set to make about
bloody decorum
dies on his lips.

“From my heart to your heart,” says Tamuz, as if explaining to an idiot child, as if
Carter
is the one without a sense of proper conduct.

——

There's an awkward moment as Carter takes the letter from the boy, before he touches it to his own chest.

“From your heart to my heart,” he says, and Tamuz nods at the restoration of etiquette, the completion of the ritual exchange. He starts off again, waving for Carter to follow him, to keep up.

“Read as you walk, Carter Bey. It is not time.”

Carter dodges after him, through a convoy of old men with wheelbarrows of oranges, skirting a group of women in scarlet-trimmed purple burkas, and opening the envelope, sliding the letter out, as he strides and weaves. More bloody letters. More bloody cryptic nonsense.

“Where are we going?”

They push deeper into the mob, even thicker here where the white block of the terminal building lours over them, close now, families and individuals, porters and hawkers streaming in and out through the glass doors, pushing past each other. Tamuz stops to let Carter catch up, then plunges them both on into the shadowy space inside, still morning-cool and crisp, filled with travelers and their echoes but somehow, in the functional minimalism of its high ceiling and concrete floor, feeling all the more cavernous and empty for it.

“Where are we going?” Carter calls over the head of a little Jewish girl in black dress, white pinafore, rag doll dangling from one hand while the other clutches the hem of her mother's skirt, to whom Carter nods—
excuse me, pardon me
—as he sidesteps past, to stand beside Tamuz at the glass and shining steel revolving doors, the main entrance of the Ben-Abba Airfields terminal.

“Tell el-Kharnain,” says Tamuz.

The boy holds up a hand, palm out.
Wait here.
Walking backward into the revolving doorway.

“I will take you to Tell el-Kharnain,” he calls back. “You will wait. I will bring the driver. Trust me. We go now,” he says. “Tell el-Kharnain.”

As Ab Irim said to his servant Eliezer, my friend, it is said that God gave suits of skin to Adam and Eve when they had eaten from the tree in his garden and gained the knowledge of good and evil, to hide their nakedness. It is said that, after he had risen to Heaven, Enoch gave these same suits to Noah to keep safe from the flood, that they were stolen from Noah by Ham, and that from Ham they were passed on, through his sons, until one day, so it is said, these tattered
suits of skin, long since torn into pieces by the ravages of time, came into the ownership of Nimrod, King of Babylon. And Nimrod looked at these skins and saw that there were words upon them.

What does this mean? Nimrod asked the idols on their pedestals.

We do not know, they answered. But surely it is the Word of God.

And what is that Word? said Nimrod.

Death, they told him.

Being a king, and more powerful than wise, Nimrod had no understanding of this word, so believing he had the Book of Enoch, the Scribe of God himself, believing he had the secret of Heaven in his grasp, he gathered wise men from every corner of his kingdom to study these scraps of skin, great men of learning, astrologers and priests to explain its meaning.

They worked on the scraps of skin, joining them this way and that, trying to find a meaning that the king would understand. They produced study after study, and they found an infinity of meaning in the scraps of skin. They found all of the world's legends in the countless permutations of a few simple symbols; they found mathematics and poetry, science and religion, elaborate theories full of wisdom which seemed true but which were full of contradictions. They learned so much that Nimrod had to build a tower to house this learning, the Tower of Babel, but still they could find no single, simple meaning that a king would understand, only the same theme that appeared time and again.

What does this mean? Nimrod would ask them.

We do not know, they would say. But surely it is the Word of God.

And what is that Word? said Nimrod.

Death, they told him.

Being a king and more powerful than wise, Nimrod had no understanding of this word, so he came to believe it meant his overthrow at the hands of some young pretender. So he gathered his soldiers from every corner of his kingdom, and he sent them out to kill every newborn boy.

Seventy thousand of them he had slaughtered because of his fear. Only one escaped, the infant Ab Irim, whose mother hid him in a cave and gave the soldiers the child of a slave in his place. In the cave Ab Irim was raised by the angel Gabriel himself—for before Sammael fell, and before the angel of fire was sent with Michael to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Gabriel, with his horn, was the angel of music. So he sang the child to sleep when he was tired and suckled the child with milk from his finger when he was hungry. Then when the child was
grown into a boy, Gabriel picked up Ab Irim and put him on his shoulder and brought him to Babel, to stand before Nimrod as his accuser.

What does this mean? Nimrod asked them.

You do not know? said Ab Irim. But surely it is the Word of God.

And what is that Word? said Nimrod.

Death, said Ab Irim.

And Ab Irim's words shattered the very idols on their pedestals, it is said. It sent all the men of wisdom mad, confounding their tongues and scattering them to the corners of the world. It panicked the soldiers so that some thought to flee and others thought to fight; but not knowing what to flee from or what to fight, they fought each other and fled from themselves, and fled from each other and fought themselves. And the great tower that Nimrod had built to contain the wise men's learning came crashing down, and the suits of skin were lost in the rubble. And the great empire that Nimrod had built to protect him from his fear came crashing down. And Nimrod finally understood death.

This is the way of things, it is said. Madness is the ruin of wisdom. And chaos is the ruin of order. The word of an innocent boy can bring down an empire at its foundations, scattering the people in confusion. An angel may have a sword that flames and a finger that flows with milk. We are all made of such contradictory natures. So too is death the ruin of life. And if God is life, eternal and spiritual, his Word, from which all creation was made, must be ephemeral and material, and we ourselves only its echo.

All men must die, my friend, for we are death itself, the Word made flesh.

“Escuzi ma. Perdun, m'sire.”

Carter steps back automatically as he looks up, mumbles apologies to the woman in the panama hat and linen suit who smiles her thanks as she brushes past and out through the revolving doors of the terminal. He tracks her as she tip-taps down the steps and turns toward the head of the taxi rank, so terribly modern in her mannish clothes, striding, breezing, a Sapphic sophisticate.

Carter scans the letter given to him by Tamuz. It's from von Strann—the Eyn, as the boy calls him, whatever that means—urging Carter to wait with the boy at his studio until he can return. Return from where? thinks Carter. The letter only says that he'll meet Carter when the time is right; for now he has to trust the boy; when he sees the rest of the Herr Professor's notebooks he will understand the
need for secrecy.
My home is yours
, the letter reads,
to do with as you wish; and I am certain that Tamuz will make sure you are comfortable until such time as I return to play the proper host to you, good Captain.
There's no address.

He folds the letter and tucks it away at the back of Samuel's notebook. The boy must have been gone for a good ten minutes now, Carter realizes, and as he taps Hobbsbaum's notebook idly against his leg he wonders whether to go looking for the lad. He holds the notebook in that way all readers used to interruptions do—one-handed, thumb holding the cover almost shut, forefinger inside keeping his place. He opens it again, but his eyes are drawn to the doorway, the revolving glass doors and the wide concrete steps down to the road filled with slow-moving cars and carts, taxis and trucks.

The leather binding of the notebook is dry and cracked and a few of the pages have come loose inside. There's something about it that bothers him even apart from the contents; it's not a personal journal, so it's not that he feels that he's invading Samuel's privacy here, but somehow it's as if… it's the way he remembers feeling any time a lad died in action and their kit had to be searched for smut or suchlike before being sent home (couldn't have a boy's parents finding pornographic penny dreadfuls among the letters from back home). It's the feeling of rifling through a dead man's life, the sense that this scrapbook or journal or pack of cards or locket is as much the mortal remains of the dead as the flesh now rotting in the mud of No Man's Land. A person's shorthand is as individual as their handwriting, often more so. It can become so personalized that others might see only a scribble when they look at it.

Carter glances out the door again. Still no sign of the boy.

The air is warming up outside now. Taking a second to peer over the crowd and get his bearings, Carter sights a falafel stall, its owner a good man to ask if he's seen the boy, Carter reckons. He starts down the steps.

“Captain Englishman! Spare a few lira for a crippled soldier, Captain Englishman?”

Carter turns, looks down. The claw of a left hand missing all but forefinger and thumb tugs at his sleeve, and he starts back at the sight of the poor beggar who owns it, knee-jerk horror hitting him like … the first time he saw a leper, a dead comrade, madness in the trenches.

“A few lira for a crippled soldier, Captain Englishman?”

The beggar is a wrecked thing. Right arm dangling dead at his side, dark and withered, with a stump where the hand should be. He sits on the steps, rags scattered
round in knotted bundles, some large, others small, a Turkish army cap upside down in front of him containing a few coins. Apart from a pair of khaki trousers—one leg cut short, folded over and pinned up where his knee ends in a stump—the creature is naked but for the grime and dust that crusts his sun-shriveled form. Weathered, leathered, he looks like some madman mystic of the Indies. Or he looks, thinks Carter, like some mummy that's crawled here from its looted tomb to beg for grave goods in eternal penury. He might be forty years old or four thousand.