Jungle Rock Blues, page 40
We took a taxi back to Gorte and then a late train to Zurich. I kept my head down, a bandaged man leading a blind man, except that it was the blind man who knew where to go. People looked at us, sure, but they didn’t look at me, not me by myself. That was my impression. I kept the brim of my hat low. The desire to stare around was intense, but I kept it buried – I was too busy coping.
And it had to be tried. All the preparations had been made. Now I had to go out into the world and see if I could pass.
I slept a night at Ünlü’s house, then, at noon the next day, caught a flight from Zurich to Istanbul. This was tricky, I had to manage the passage through Passport Control with my new name and documentation, wearing the brown-tinted contact lenses that made me blink. I had always to remember not to speak out – “It’s your voice which, finally, will snag in someone’s memory,” Eve had said. This was on the phone from California, from Ünlü’s study. It was so good to hear her, I almost wept.
The passengers clapped as the pilot touched the plane down on the runway.
Then I was there – walking, alone, through Immigration and Customs, and then out into the concourse. People sitting on rugs, drinking tea from glasses, people with dark eyes in dark faces. Istanbul.
A taksi carried me to a hotel that took American dollars, sure thing Chief, I had a sweaty night and was woken at five a.m. by the call to prayer – was served olives and watermelon and cold boiled eggs for breakfast. Istanbul when I went out into it was impossible, terrifyingly crowded and busy, an anthill, but I had a mission, it was all written in my instructions, the plan worked out by Ünlü and Eve. A bus, overnight, to Marmaris, way in the south somewhere, more or less a straight line down the map, then ask for a dolmush, which apparently was some kind of a shared taxi, to Bozburun. Find a pension, which was some kind of a hotel.
Turkey unseen, huge out the dark windows of the bus. Horns honking. Trying to sleep in the narrow seat.
Everything rushing at me.
And then I was in the dolmush, which was an old white Commer van, dusty, with nine other men, all completely uninterested in strangers. Polite men, a little bit formal after Americans, I liked them, with their heavy stubble and sweaty faces. They wore hats too. They didn’t stare at me and I tried not to stare back. The air was full of brown dust. For an hour we swayed along dirt roads, I had to duck to see out the windows – glimpses of a burned, stony land. Then when we came down a steep hill, slowly, the brakes straining, there was the sea, radiantly blue. Round a corner and, dodging a running rooster, into the village – and I knew that Ünlü had sent me to a paradise.
I stayed in Bozburun for eight months
I walked in the hills, went swimming, ate carefully. My body began to change. Each morning in my room I did exercises. During the day I set myself challenges – run to the top of the stubby hill in eighteen minutes – and regained my agility, my sense of smell. I was proud of myself. But Eve’s voice was always in my ear. “Move as though you’re smaller. Shorter strides, be prepared to take the path that goes around people rather than straight ahead. Be just a little more stiff.” This was difficult, when what I wanted to do was to make every step a huge one, to push myself – to run as though I was running myself into being someone else. The people who lived here strode out also. They moved as I did, easily, relaxed, and so I didn’t worry too hard. Sure, I kept to myself, and I was always on the lookout for foreigners. Boats came to Bozburun, suddenly you heard English voices. But it seemed I had escaped.
It did feel like that – an escape from prison.
In my pension, two rooms at the top of a large white house called Welcome, I used the instructions Eve had given me to improve my writing. “Find a passage in a book, copy it out.” Even today, my writing looks strange, like a handwritten imitation of type. “You have to be able to read and write if you’re going to survive. And practice your Marshall signature.” Sometimes the boats played music – Me and You and a Dog Named Boo – and I would sit upright at my table in the cafe and hold still, listening.
But mostly it was a world of roosters crowing, tractor sounds, the blue of the harbour, grey grizzled hills, dusty streets, fish making ripples, lizards, the call to prayer, a tortoise under a sharp-prickled bush, women in headscarves, warm loaves with a pale crack down the back. I loved to watch the people going about their lives. In America this had been hard to do, there was always a crowd looking back at me. Here I could walk slowly among the backyards, see the meals being cooked out among the animals. The lives of humans, I always want to see that. I have never really had my fill of that.
Gradually my bandages came off. I would spend hours at the mirror, trying to judge whether the broader nose, the cheekbones, the thicker jaw were enough. Outside I always wore sunglasses and a hat, plus a full beard – surely?
Enough for what, exactly? I now had a good version of my past worked up, names, pictures I could call on – but what pictures could I see that constituted a future? Eve had never said anything about that. I saw myself sitting in my room with a girl and her slowly peeling the hat away from my head. The shades. “Why don’t you shave? There’s something about you ...” Would I run? Or would I trust her? Or would I have to keep playing a game?
Bozburun was cheap, cheap, I could have lived there forever. But I wanted to see things. That was it. I wanted to see the world – to see what the world was. One morning when the call to prayer came I was already up, at the balcony rail, watching the fishing boats putter out through the entrance to the harbour and I thought, I’ll go too. By midday I was packed, paid up, hat on, shades, and was waiting for the midday dolmush with four of the villagers. No one waved me goodbye. But as the van groaned up out of the town I felt a new sensation – the goodbye blues. I’d been at peace there. I had a life, of sorts, but I was leaving. I remembered leaving the gorilla valley and, later, leaving June. It was as though, then, I didn’t know what I was being parted from. I had never really had a home, not a place I had chosen, or even a place that had chosen me. Those two rooms in Bozburun, with the view of the harbour, how peacefully they had contained me, and yet they were guest rooms. As the engine of the van roared I saw that I was a kind of guest, a visitor to the lives of other people. I did want to see the world. But also I was looking, for a place I would not have to leave.
For a month I took local buses and was in that countryside, looking, looking. At Olympos there were ruins, cold stones that had once been warmed by people, and, high on a mountainside, in the night, blue flames which sprang from bare rock and had burned there for two thousand years – a mystery. At Üçagiz the ruins were under water, you saw steps going down a cliff-face to wobbling blue rooms that fish swam through. Every village, every bus stop had something to see from a world of human lives that had, so long ago, made a mark before leaving. The Turkish people would show you and explain, knowing that you would be interested, but they themselves simply lived among these things. I saw that just to look, to have what your eyes could give you, a piece of the world, this was a big part of what the people who came to stare at Caliban had been after. Another world that was your world.
But I wasn’t only seeing. There were so many little ways to learn. Waiting, for instance. In America, Caliban had never waited for anything. Whatever you asked for arrived, right now. He had never queued. The way the body must go into a float at these times, the way that you must observe the turning of the shadows, must simply hang in the air while, tick, tick, drip by drip, the minutes pass. I tried to think but the sun beat down, you can’t always be thinking.
And so I began, quite casually at first, to look for those spaces that had been described to me by Delmo McMullins. In courtyards, bus stations, seated in a rectangle of shade and waiting for a connection, I would gaze about from under my hat, searching for angel places.
I returned to Istanbul and made myself endure the crush of that anthill city. Wah – this was humankind. The way the faces streamed at you, when you walked down through the covered bazaar, it was clear that they were endless, would always keep coming, and that the singleness that you felt inside was something replicated every fifteen inches by the next man and the next and the next. As Caliban I had been tight-pressed by crowds, but beyond them I could see the car, the hotel, a walled and private space of some sort. Here, your flesh was always going to be pressed, you were always going to be reminded of how you were replicated. How common you were.
I crossed the Bosporus, took local trains down through Greece, alert always for those who spoke English. There were more of them here. I avoided anyone who would speak to me – inside my head I was always practising what I might say. From Athens I flew to Cairo and rode a swaying camel out across the rippling sands to see the pyramids. The Sphinx gazed above my head. So was this an angel’s face? Had the Sphinx actually been an angel? No. This face was pitiless, a quality which might be part of what was in an angel’s face, but surely an angel was also devoted to recognition?
Yes, I realised there in the landscape of sand: the quality of an angel was intimate. She was the one who had read the book of your life. The more I thought about this, the more I was sure of it. The spaces I stared into had the faintest glow, I noticed, as though a residue had been left there. Sometimes you had to look away to catch this, or wait for the right time of day. Which corresponded with what Mrs Presley had told me, that a visit from an angel would leave a trace inside you.
The Sphinx simply absorbed whatever you gave it.
Working it all out in my head while beneath me the camel trod and trod. The angel spaces were areas for which there was no other purpose. The world used everything that it could, anyone could see that. But there were vacant corners, eddies, sites that had no worldly purpose. Here the memories collected, the abandoned feelings, the lost impulses. This is what attracted the angels, I decided, whose task it was to record all – especially what you had forgotten – and give it back to you for your use on Judgement Day.
In Cairo I bought a camera and began to take photographs of those angel places. And I now began to direct my travels towards seeing faces. Not an angel’s face, you can’t pursue that directly, but on the one hand the faces in my old book from the cabin, my first bible – all the tribes of the world. In Ghana, in Chile, among the Inuit I travelled, and ate their food, and walked beside them. Slept in their dwellings. And on the other hand I looked at the faces they had made to watch over themselves. Some of these were painted, some were carved in wood. But the faces I stared into longest were carved in stone. In the museums was where you saw most of these, now, so old that many of their features were gone. A shaped stone, two metres high, in a sunny room at the rear of the Museum For Ancient Man in the district of Mitte, in Berlin, in West Germany ... outside in the garden a busker is playing Für Elise on an electric piano and it comes faintly into the high-civilised, temperature-controlled room, where there are amber beads and hammered bronze hairpins and skinny daggers, all laid out inside glass cases, numbered and dated, with a history of how in the nineteenth century these things were scratched from the dirt and brought here to rest – here he stands. The little white card which is all he has now for a name is on the floor beside his feet, it’s in German and I can’t learn much from it, only that he’s from the sixth century BC and is maybe from Syria – there’s a question mark. As tall as I am, chunky, this standing stone, his colour is dark, a black-grey that has some red in it. He has stumpy little legs, stumpy arms, a square chest, a big block of a head. Time has knocked most of the chips from the block. Almost all his features are now gone, in the cold stone now there are just faint hollows for eyes, the ghost of a line where his nose descended, white, and then, as you stare, his mouth can be made out. It’s downturned. And in the museum light of the room you stare into his face and because it’s expressive it’s the mouth that finally your gaze falls on. Why so grim? Did the people wish to say to the world, If you fuck with us you’ll be sorry? It’s possible, but I don’t think so. No, he seems to me to be something they made for themselves. Okay, but to say what? To remind themselves to do right, because they will never be forgiven? To say that nothing stands in the face of time? His eyes don’t follow you. He doesn’t see you. None of these figures see you. They gaze, like the Sphinx, like the Colonel, out towards something that is so remote that you can’t imagine what it might be. Some people say they were built by spacemen and I can understand the idea, that they have their eyes on the distant home. But this is not what I think. To me these faces, which now stand mostly in museums, they were the stone end of a scale – the terrible silence which is moved by nothing, which sees starving children with swollen bellies, the terrible waters which rise, the absences of water, the way that blood is let out of bodies to run into the soil, on and on through every moment of the world’s existence, and is not moved. Won’t speak. And along at the other end? Well, this is why you can only laugh at the stone angels that you see, tragic-faced, in graveyards. Stone wings with stone feathers – these never flew. At the other end of that scale there is only light, and faint light at that, almost nothing. But at the angel end every tiny tremor within you is known.
I had never seen an Aboriginal of Australia and so I worked my way down through Indonesia, catching local boats, hopping from island to island, until I came to the biggest island of them all, hanging there on the underside of the globe, baked hard by the sun, where the shadows seem so long and the dust has been stirred and stirred. I had been Marshall Sturt now for four years, and now I was coming home, it seemed like that, partly because the gorilla valley was just across the water now, in New Zealand, but also because of the explorer, Captain Charles Sturt, from whom I had borrowed my aftername. In Australia, everyone remarked on that Sturt and I would nod and say, no, I’m not related, but I know about him. That was okay – as long as you knew. But also home because I saw at once that never had I been in a place where the traces of the angels were so thick on the ground. Every tree had an angel face. Such a dried-out land. At dusk I would walk through the city parks and my scalp would rise. You could hear the birds calling, strange sounds from a singular continent, but under that was a tone that was so loud, so deep that it was astonishing that everything didn’t fall flat before it. And everywhere I looked the faded yellow light, loaded with dust, would gather in, say, the space between two trunks – under a bench, in a gateway – and you would be aware of a shape forming, a pattern of light that all but had features.
For several years I had been using coloured film to capture these places, and having my photographs developed by any old chemist. Finally one man, this was back in Cape Town, said to me, “Son, what are your pictures of?” Pictures orv. “There is nothing in them.” He wore a white lab coat, and had a round brown head like a beaten copper balloon, a little dented, with just some strings of hair glued across the top of it. I told him, angel places, and he stared at me and then asked if he could look at the pictures again. He was standing close to me and I could feel the beefy weakness of him, he was blown up too big and was going to die soon – he knew this too and he was afraid, you could feel that fear in him, that his life of eating up large now had to be paid for. He gave the pictures back to me and he said, “You won’t get what you want, that way. Are these what you want?” and his thick finger flicked the packet that held the photographs. Well, he was right, I was always disappointed in the photographs, but that hadn’t bothered me, I had got what I was after when I pressed the shutter. He said, “You will need black-and-white film, and you should learn to develop your own pictures. If you would like I will teach you.”
So I stayed in a hostel and each night I went to the darkroom at the side of his big, gated house (black-and-white, darkroom, these at that time were loaded words in South Africa) and he showed me how to make the images come floating out of the liquid. The chemicals there made you dizzy. In the plastic tray the pictures came swimming up. Each time I was almost afraid. These were his pictures, of course, he took snaps of his family, of his home and garden and shop. I didn’t understand what his pictures were for. It seemed that he just liked the idea that you stood dizzy in this dark room and something came towards you, proof of what you had acquired, maybe. If you could prove you had managed to surround yourself with the things of life then you could say you were alive – was that it?
I could have talked to him about that.
Anyway – after that I used black-and-white film and carried it with me, in a black-lined bag, waiting until the day I found a place to stop, where I could set up a room to do my own developing. By the time I reached Australia that bag was getting pretty full.
Up north, I visited the Aboriginals but I left my camera behind. I knew they wanted to keep their souls. This idea had begun to worry me, that having so many pictures taken of myself had taken something away. Did I have a soul left? The Aboriginals liked me, so maybe that was a good sign – that’s what I thought, then. But I was only a guest, only a visitor to their lives. I climbed their rock and all the time I was trying to look at them – I thought they were maybe like the me I had been when I lived among the gorillas. But they know what you’re doing. They don’t like you being on their rock, you can tell it, and they don’t like themselves for allowing you to come, and the whole thing is bad. The Aboriginals don’t look good, you see them drunk or just sitting and you think about what Australia should do. Now that I live here I have come to care about that.
But at that time I had had other business. I said, well, that’s Aboriginals crossed off your list – that’s what I told myself, and I started to look around at other things. There really is no place like Australia for things – everywhere you look there is another thing that is Australian. Everything here has got total Australia in it. It occurs to me, has occurred to me now for some years, that Australia is the next America. Increasingly, I see the world looking this way and I ask myself: is that why the angels are here?
