part two

 

naming friday’s island

 

 

 

one

 

 

I had failed to save mankind. I set sail from Brazil accordingly. I paid less than the lowest fare, and so, not quite passenger and not quite crew I mingled freely with both, and enjoyed their privileges. The ship made many stops, and each time I practised disembarking – interviews with touts, employers, the police, house sellers – though I had no wish to take a job or a house.

The sun set behind Brazil like an orange dropping into the fire. A religious fanatic, a refugee of some kind, foolishly calling himself Jones, joined me. The sky turned from sapphire to the black of a pocket filled with snuff. He said, ‘Dead ears, all stuffed up with ginseng.’

‘Ginseng?’

He looked gloomy. ‘Orientals in competition. Slice your head, you never feel a thing – special swordplay.’

I decided finally to land when there was a risk of drifting back to Brazil. From Jones I had learned about the theatre, from Dr Bhadhyopadhyay about treating playing cards with herbs, so you could read the others’ hands through their allergies. I learned Koran couplets from an Italian carpenter, and was inspired to re-read Trotsky by a broker in the futures’ market.

I was soon sure I had landed in Ireland. A man in an obé frame blessed us as we went ashore – a wicker mask crowned with a cage for humming birds, untenanted. ‘Just call me if your house needs blessing,’ he said. ‘But better first ask your wife.’

I had no wish to take a house, or a wife. They had this free and easy turn, so that you ‘took’ things and found yourself crucified to them for ever.

I missed Brazil, the towns that were like houses, green interspersed with courtyards and little dappling trees – here men mending bagpipes, or others filing down the sights on rifles, and there dark linen rooms full of animals, mostly becoming iguanas, through neglect. A country not European, but that held all Europes and Africas packed together, grumbling and tapping like yams still live: Asias worn out and stuck together with glue from dragon fish, their fins served up a block away, still waving as you chewed them, – and all this never knowing, quite, what it was all there for. Whether it had died and gone to nowhere, or whether it was a continental placenta, nourishing things that might be nice or nasty, but surely nowhere near to being born.

After my tricky comrades on the boat, I was surprised the first world still carried on: still filling in its forms, checking who came in and out, letting them believe in things not too outré – and discussing them, how they discussed them endlessly!

Of course, I was soon back to wearing suits and shoes: the plastic race of plastic men stood me in good stead, and I changed shape and form. I had returned a proud blue beetle on a scarlet leaf, and soon became a tall, intelligent grey hopper lining up for jobs. The broker – tall as a jack-rabbit, same familiarity with the top-hat universe – advised me – ‘It will all end in implosion here, so get respectable. Find a crack in the walls, and when they all go trumpeting down, just slip right through.’

The plastic attribute does help us out: I followed his advice, and applied to the police. The first inspector asked me about Brazil. I said, ‘The end of the world is coming there.’ I tried to be neutral, or, indeed, enthusiastic, like Jones. The inspector said, ‘Ah yes, inflation.’

‘No, I think too much late night drumming. One suffers from a tamtamming in the blood, waits for the coincidence of all in one massive, final thump.’

I passed my tests. One comment, I saw, was ‘Excessively stable’, and another ‘Supercharged running dog’, but that must have been from the Trotskyist. In a mature democracy, they told me, everyone makes and respects the law, so we are all policemen, if not judges and warders. I said, ‘I’m accustomed to immaturity,’ and there was laughter as though I’d told a daring lie.

I had fooled them. As I had fooled the Brazilians, and all the cloned Mengeles. I was king-president of the world. I laughed. In the offices, they were all laughing, men and women, as if the movement hadn’t been heard of here, as though a grin could spread from side to side, without a rictus of self-criticism or disgust or even censure. I had come back from a complicated world. And this one seemed simple, full of simple folk, with glands that writhed, with kids that gave them trouble, and yet who laughed, who never thought of mass murdering anyone, or even dropping them from helicopters. Two different worlds. And which one was I king of? Was it too greedy to think – both? At any rate, I laughed, I had won again. I went out into the pale night, and joined the other tall grey intelligent hoppers as we dodged the cars, and looked for something to do that evening that would be illegal.

 

* * *

 

The magic has gone, expended, worn down by rubbing, an amulet worn thin, holed. Too much written about in the nutmeggy backrooms of alchemists, then stacked on chemists’ shelves, then, Cheshire catlike, into mists, just mists. Magic.

Messy and cruel with jackdaws in rural English sheds. Then, the real thing – naked and fearing for one’s life. Ah yes, Brazil. Then, confusing the mystery with the higher purposes, and all reduced again to cruelty, the cells, the fields, where deaths come by the bushel. The higher purposes, the mysteries are all gone under. (Though it isn’t true that all those rooms and fields have gone.)

Magical mysteries are a poor guide – like those shifty Indians all pointing to the true West: panning for gold, then panning out of frame. And killing ritually, the animals, and the others, and ourselves. An odd quirk in a master-species.

Half-convinced, half-glad, that magic had been driven back, or underground, I search for truth instead. Sour, flat taste.

And so, policing. Not a truth distilled, concocted, but drawn from living humans, draining them of truth, leaving them sane and whole. A job in the eye of moral fires, in the cockpit of commitment, it seemed to me – flying at sunset up the Amazon into the sun’s one burning eye.

The magic has gone, is going. Is regrouping in the wings, under the unused flaps of brain – a new departure or regression, back to the primal state: eating each other, without regret, quite a science of the tasty bits. I was glad of police-sized mysteries again. I was a white man discovering Europe anew But the people too had gone. Jones would reappear – a shaking figure from the Sixties, adding decades as he drank his gin gimlets, boasting of foundations conned, of legions saved from drugs and put in camps. ‘Yes, my friend,’ he’d say, ‘it is banal – but perhaps the trick is this: the world ends many, many times. It always ends, and every day is reincarnated as an old, old thing, a zombie with the memory of all its previous lives compacted, sedimented ...’ I told him: ‘That’s the gin – “it doth dissolve the brain”, as they used to say, swilling it down.’ But he had become a zombie fixed on doing good.

My good Dr Bhadhyopadhyay wrote me from Madras, where I fear his itchy tricks had landed him in jail, for poisoning, and not for cheating: ‘Betrayed by my pharmacist, I fear. As it were a pregnancy acquired by bad luck, or a short shelf life, some inattention – and, alas, I held the pair of black queens to a dusty hedge of weeds from which, ahimé, I saw the one-eyed blackjack’s profile jut.’

He seemed set for life. The Italian, I heard, was on a contract in Qom, and the Trotskyist was bidding for a government post in France. I laid my friendships as a tribute before my chiefs. ‘You’re odd,’ said one, no hopper he but a land-admiral braided and collared like a cutlet.

But they saw me as a ‘political’, one whose sympathy would wheedle him in to any coven, any sect. ‘If you have a separatists’ section, I might fit there,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of people-stew and continents. Principles of division, islands and archipelagos, fratricides, divorces, even the vendetta...’

 

* * *

 

They were excited by vendetta. They sent me to learn about it on an island. I asked, ‘Is vendetta a reason for separatism, or is separatism an alternative to vendetta? Does fratricide work, or is it a defence against a higher form of struggle – killing, if I may be indelicate, us, even us cops? Is the vision flawed and limited, and so falls back on thefts of sheep? instead of starting from the other path, and climbing up to national pride, and states, your own brass bands and stamps? and then to fuller union with the other states, and all the while fighting for that equal status that in the end will allow a wider, deeper federation, formation of a world Brazil ..?’

The last word was an error, that involuntarily betrayed my love, my love for Brazil – a country that otherwise might mean, well, next to nothing to me, since in any case it was enough, even extravagantly, loved by others, but which, all the same, in its worldly way, had been my world for many years. A jungle of the mind that stretched so far, so lonely in the end you knew there were no other minds out there, no anything, no others had been created, ever, and that your vast mind included every needle point of insect, thip of drum and zick of bird invisible, encysted in an ironwood tree – that in its loneliness, aloneness, your mind had become the world. That was called Brazil ...

I studied the principles of separation – from the loved and hated ones; from life, from family, from mother tongue and mother nature. I studied alienation – even Jones’s swordplay. And I studied the island. On the mainland, I visited its museum, with my Guardian Inspector, Chiara. She said, ‘The museum is disorderly.’ Carefully they had dug up families and brought them here, lacking the limbs or skullbones sent to Hamburg or to Leningrad. Had they been short or tall? Foetal now, again expectant. I said, confirming this, ‘They seem to have been a hopeful people.’ She corrected me, ‘Peoples.’

They had made death a complex enterprise. Chiara said, ‘They were much attached to death.’ We stumbled over things, and she fell. We were tightly packed into a double sarcophagus. I held my breath to avoid misting her breast. When we had extricated ourselves, I said, ‘I was afraid I might do the wrong thing there.’

‘But you did nothing.’

‘I tried, at least, to be authentic. Not macho.’

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘You can always masturbate. Policemen are so adept at it.’

I considered this: ‘Detectives, one presumed – the Holmes instance, though there is Poirot ...’

‘Not private, nor yet uniformed. Insisting on being Belgian makes one think he was a wanker too.’

We turned our skills to the sarcophagus. She said, ‘They were smaller than us.’

‘Or more relaxed, in death. Besides, hacking out the hollow in the alabaster must have been a pain, no point in overdoing it.’

‘Perhaps they believed in the grave’s embrace,’ she said.

‘Can you be teasing me, Inspector?’ I suggested. How strange, after all, is this profession. From pistolero to saviour of the world, to stowaway to castaway – one forgets the exact modalities, the real and the excuses – to nuzzling the Lady Inspector, as an equal. The sinner on the right hand of the Lord God. There is scarcely time to ask, ‘Why me?’, think of a postcard for Bhadhyopadhyay in the communal cell, tossing with bad dreams like a Noah’s Ark.

Chiara is off, running with me: everything here is exams, being something professional seems very important to them. I have no fear. I have been on trial before real judges. Fought and survived Armageddons, wear the medals from them like puckered bullet holes, one here, one there.

I prefer to remember Chiara inquisitorial, still unconsciously waving her body at me like a flag. Come on, bull, answer this questionnaire:

‘Do you feel yourself capable of love?’

      ‘Yes. No. I have loved, been in love. It doesn’t impinge.’

She insists: ‘Not very important? It is for most people.’

‘At one time, yes, it is of course. But – one ceases to be an actor in the first person.’

‘Good and evil. Right and wrong. How do you feel about them?’

I say – but do not think – ‘This is an implausible conversation for two cops.’

She says, ‘We are implausible as police: that’s what being professionals does. Look at armies now – no stereotypes there.’

I tell her, ‘I feel strongly about right and wrong, nothing for good and evil.’

She screws up her face: ‘And loyalties?’

‘Are very important,’ I assure her.

Being in a museum is like being professionally dead. I ask casually, ‘I wonder how many of these drysticks were killed in vend­ettas?’

Chiara says, ‘The vendetta is a human thing, it has dimensions we are losing. One on one. I take, and so I suffer. I kill you, you kill my brother. We do our accounts, adding one on one, for ever. It’s unstoppable.’

I agree: ‘It’s living in a morass, pulling people in and standing on their heads to get out, and then there’s someone else to stand on yours.’

The Inspector says, ‘Here, we call that morass a family. The only way to make men good is have them commit suicide.’     

I ask, ‘You mean, we pure souls, we policemen, compromised and tarnished by the century, can’t do the killing ourselves, help it all along?’ I’m secretly convinced we can’t, and so, as regards the test, I’m still well ahead. It’s true there have been times ... but then, that’s what time is for, the tricky old artichoking circle.

She’s shocked: ‘Of course we can’t kill people to stop them being human. That’s why our job’s so hard, so unrewarding.’ She looks wistfully towards the sarcophagus. I remember the banks of rivers lined with mantises, the jewels with jewels for eyes, that looked at you – instead of praying to that green, that high green water, as rich as lobsters’ brains. She goes on. ‘We want you to watch a group of people – moving, perhaps, from rural mafias towards separatism. From self-defence to politics.’

I remark, ‘It sounds implausible,’ and remember, the mantis never makes a sound, only the Other, met with, fancied, thoroughly palpated, makes a prandial crunching noise. I add, ‘You look like a mantis in those shades.’ She takes them off, and says, ‘The light ...’ but there’s no light in here, just phosphorous quivering on the bones, a weak pulse in the alabaster, afterlight in crystal cases. She takes the glasses off, beneath they’re eyes of mantis green. She laughs, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve already eaten.’

I say, ‘I don’t worry. I have lost the capacity to fear.’

And Chiara says, ‘Fear isn’t our concern. Your job is estimating other people’s will to win, how serious they are.’

‘It sounds portentous.’

Dr Bhadhyopadhyay’s ghost leaps before me like a rabbit suddenly skinned, and says, ‘Of course they can’t help us on, to leave our skins – but they do, they do ...’ and he waved his hands horribly, and his name lingered on under my eyelids, heavy and absent as a death mask, portentous like a postcard signed only with a name. From jail, BHADHYOPADHYAY. Enough. No more. Life.

 

 

 

two

 

 

When we left the museum, I say, ‘It’s nice that my group is all friends, and nice names too: Crespi the leader, Bozo, the crooked one, and Darya who’s into design. Then there’s Cecilia – in short, a high-schoolish kind of crowd.’ Chiara says, ‘They’re very young. But they will pull your nose. And they have big brothers, all of them.’

Two little boys were singing a song about pustules, ‘some are like beans, and some like toads’. Inspector Chiara says, ‘How wide the gaps between the generations grow. And yet, my grandfather used to sing about carbuncles – most stubborn and temperamental things they are – or were. I think they are no more – certainly one doesn’t sing about them today.’ Her scrambled sense was oppressive. I thought of the carpenter in Qom: ‘I love to live with Arabs,’ he said. I told him, ‘I think you may find they are not Arabs.’ She continues:

‘It’s the enthusiasm, the morality, the reasoning. All the things we have lost faith in.

Think of all the terrible things we did – even the sergeants. The road block, the cell, the fax machine, the killing grounds, the killing bottle, the loyalty oath, the skull callipers, the special rifles, garrotte ... It’s all too much – and every morning too, ‘Pigshit threatens water tables.’ I mean, what can one like myself do, a humble artisan, and not even in the plumbing trade?’

I think, ‘The human intellect is a marvellous thing – but impossible to live with.’ I feel my parchment citation, the Armageddon’s survivor warrant – a parchment running, figured and cracked, up from my toes, all over, made of fresh hopper hide. I say to Chiara, ‘Very well. I accept the challenge.’

She says, distracted, ‘There are so many little bits of things that don’t fit in, like islands, languages. But be careful – if they become big bosses, or go into politics – they’ll be our chiefs. Try,’ she says, anxious, ‘to find and keep them on a middle path. 15% at election time, something less in terms of crime. And don’t,’ she smiles, ‘expect any help from us.’

Ah, Chiara, to say things like that, you must have a parchment skin like mine, written on and even signed by angels. Brazilian angels. But I mildly say, ‘If they won’t stay in their place, I shall make a place for them,’ as though that responded to something that she’d said.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Crime is fascinating, perhaps the last really intriguing sub­ject. It comes in all sizes, some of it sits in the armchair opposite us, it flickers in eyes and gestures in the street, in the bedroom, it hums like a shorted wire on the racetrack and at the passing-out parade, whistles in the grille of the confessional and snarls as the traffic-lights go green. A pity it is also – one is not surprised – so often boring and banal.

Crespini – ‘Thistles’ – became radicalised through his vacations, I read in the report on him. There’s an agency that runs consciousness-raising tours to dying areas of the planet. The price is low, of course. You can talk to social workers, and the nuns: the cops, of course, and ‘Crespi’ came back from these dramas raw as a sliced fruit. Sensitive and pessimistic: in our terms, a nihilist.

This city is a marvel. Much shut up and abandoned two hundred years ago. And then, a new Landsknechten’s ramp in 1927, and then, it seems, every decade after. Physical union with Africa a few years ago, and now, a kind of stabilised Paraguay. We hoppers still look silly, with all the ants and beetles that abound. I see a big marble foot, an ape worn down by caresses to a candle-stub of rock. ‘On the last day of his labours, the saint gathered the pages of his book to bind them – but a divine breath wafted them about and, taking this as a sign, he bound them thus’ – a whole library, now ‘Of the Disordered Books’. Artisans, burghers – it seems they’ve had their revolution here, the aristocrats and popes are stuffed away somewhere. But who commands here? It cannot be the people: the crowds are tourists, and there is no mob. The rule of all by all, perhaps. But that would be ingenuous.

No doubt too, it will be a fine island. They say that graffiti are the signs of noone on asocial spaces. Perhaps on the island there will be graffiti, like in the city. Graffiti make me feel at home – graffiti mean literacy, and in them there is never black magic. In writing is no mystery.

I say to Chiara, ‘Is it possible I am to investigate where there’s no crime, to infiltrate where there is only friendship?’ She stares. Although travel changes one’s shape and hair colour she makes me feel an alien again. ‘Of course there is crime. They kill each other all the time. But to defend, maintain the balances and keep the walls secure against the modern state, and me, and you. If they break out, who knows where they may end? We have to stop the village killings, but who knows? – if they turn away from rural feuds, they would make life difficult. Where would we go for our holidays? What would happen to mod cons?’

Is this the truth? Or should I flesh out my colleague’s tale, with protestations of my own – for scientific method, for self-determination, or against it: being a policeman, I observe, puts one in the middle where no middles used to be.

If honesty is the thing, then I’ll say, ‘You’ve given me no good cause for endangering myself.’

All traces of her passion in the funerary room have faded: she says, ‘You should have thought of this before you were born.’ Indeed. Also the problem of one’s self-reproduction, now that the old puzzler of food and lodging has been resolved.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She passed me to a colleague on the island. They are all women now, the cops, the entrance exams being anonymous, they have a better chance. More than a better one: the profession, let us call it that, is wholly feminised. And Nadia – though Nadia has a small moustache, it’s quite uncoplike. Instead of chewing old cigars, they work at intelligence tests, represent the third force of feminism. They’re avid for my talk of criminality: they make me welcome like Fantomas, and sit round me on their desks, offering different sweets, and looking like nicer Shirley Temples. I tell them of Adnan-Trotsky, his devices for breaking and entering, of Dr Bhadhyopadhyay in the hope it may win him leniency, or a change of mates. They seem uneasy with criminals.

The papers tell me of embezzlers castrated, witnesses with mouths scored out by phosphor candies, traitors shot through the eyes – it seems there’s a surreal signsmith with an arsenal and a host of enemies.

The streets that twist like unwashed trines start to smell of blood to me. Here, there’s an edge to unemployment. I am at home here. It is here that I, and Jones, and the others – Adnan, the passionate Mirabeau; the ever-misinformed Tonino; the good Doctor with his poisoned fox – will meet our deaths. And better that, than the college movie scene, down in the police barracks. But – not here, not now: and not for nothing, abducted, dumped, and ignorant, one’s life in the late afternoon spacing out, like golden needles baffed from a gong or cymbal. Not like that. If not to save the world, then at least to understand it, the tugging between luxury and indolence, lust and rage – the battle of the deadly sins that seems so like the little drama every hopper knows.

I, of course, sensed violence, a maleness and alienation, a lack of culture – in the Brazilian sense – so deep it was like being in reformatory. But I was wrong. These people were a net, a web, a morass. They were related, enmeshed, treacling together like the rings in a banyan tree. They were a band, a gang, a family, congregation, faith; that I had carefully decided, before my birth, as Chiara says, not, never, to be; except by the unavoidable rubbing of the other discs on all the other discs, the sanding down by all the other sand grains, people depositing their bones and crust on me, polyp on polyp. I was a hopper who shunned the others, and sought my minimal company with the brighter, and more dangerous insects, daring them to eat, or chew at least.

The grey and blue men in the bars were a spider’s trap of complicity, owls’ pellets of kinship. Nadia launched me in the main street – the last skittle, a pacifist sheriff. I ask, ‘Are you sure this is the right way to get introduced?’

She giggles and says, ‘We’re not allowed to talk to any of them. They have ways of sucking us in.’

Crespi, ‘Thistles’, she could point out.

My God, I think, who is this little goblin, like a mess of stew without a pot, the features sooty and vegetable, half a shepherd, half a bohemian in clothes a shepherd would have thrown away? Is it possible – this blackness in all this brownness, that voice like tobacco pouches, those goat’s eyes? Well, those goats’ eyes with white pupils might explain his drawing – or as Nadia said, his sucking – power. He was quite drunk, and lying on a marble bench. His boots parked neat, feet white like a shepherd’s. No one would steal those boots.

He was half holy man, half spaced out kid: and half goatherd and half goat. A largely disagreeable person, but who sneaked under your fingernails like peat. A miniature. A study for himself as something larger, like a set of Laocoons three centimetres tall. Much detail, energy, and now quite, quite drunk.

Taking advantage of his absent presence, I wonder, is there an emptiness here, a new nothing, and is he part of it, or is he capable of filling it? These shepherds – who are now become also something else, perhaps a bit lost, a bit out of their depth – have they lost their little powers, their autonomy, putting up with being young and powerless so that one day, they will be head, make the decisions? Is it for this they’re fighting, using the old ways, cunningly swimming with the new? Or is it all imploding?

All banks and loans and subsidies, but really unemployment, being left behind, condemned to modern life, but at the furthest edge. Not even bandits, but the bands of brown men from the fields, the pastures: recruits resisting what they might really be, forerunners of a war against colonialists who say they have no power, and no pretensions – but want a place to take their holidays. Am I to see the little powers expire, or maybe some new, big power? And once more Sergeant Death buys the last drink and draws up ragged men in squads.

Only – they’re not ragged. Maybe Nadia, with her gun, will keep them in some order, or find them one; and find one for herself. I had one, but left it in Brazil. My soul, it flew into a tree – and still so many birds, so many trees, and every black or scarlet bird a black soul or a white one, humanist or not. Thistle opens a white eye: ‘Are you afraid to tell me what you’re thinking?’

‘I think my soul is sitting in a carob tree,’ I say.

‘Then it is luckier than mine,’ he says. Yes, he wants the bigger power. Not lurking behind the cork trees with his pistol, but up front. He’s very drunk, and for a moment I think of my own powers, a quick arrest, and to the barracks. He says, ‘But that would spoil the story. And besides, that would have only added your provocation to mine – and sucked you in.’

He is right, it’s easy to feel superior. But when you have just come from Brazil, you have seen everything, done everything, had it done to you. After a while, a timid modesty returns, and you forget to be obnoxious.

He says, ‘Cop, journalist, do you have a name?’

‘Friday. I used to be Thursday.’

‘Let’s hope at least the Fridays can give their own name.’

I ask, ‘Because of the passage of time, you think they learn?’

He says, ‘No, because of the passage of Robinsons.’

We have established something, perhaps what they call (though not in Brazil) a relationship.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Later, Thistle wrote me up in his journal, twisting the keys to fit his twisted lock, opening up himself to himself.

 

It was raining, and he seemed to have swum ashore, a tall, an elongated Robinson. Not expecting Fridays, though. Not expecting anything, anything at all. A real man without expectations. But not like a cop. They don’t get wet, don’t strike you, as this one did, as being tall, tall like a tall tree might be lonely. Cops are trained not to be surprised, they come from silent families into silent hierarchies. They ask criminals what life is like, and then they send them down. But this long streak, so self-important, – he was a Robinson. Might be an actor. But mostly, he just clung to wrecks and thought of treasure; hugged a plank and thought of slaves, of boys and girls a-romping in the sand. Yes, he’s a watcher. That’s why he’s beached up with the cops. They must despise him – but to him, they are the wreck. They went down and here he is – hugging what’s left of them, a plank, nearing the hostile shore. A Robinson. I said to him, ‘Welcome aboard my island, cop Robinson.

 

We look up at the municipal offices, where Progress handed a telegraph pole to Liberty: a vulcan handed her some bulbs to spread her light with. We look up at the municipal offices, and the badge where Moors were drawn, quartered by heralds: scanning the island – for liberty, or some new confinement? Certainly not anarchy, and if for liberty, it must be one of the kinds that reveals itself by striving for it in its absence.

Thistle is doing deals for medals and T-shirts. Ecology the theme, fear of species death replaces mere fear of our own, or even mega-deaths by bombs. Fashion medals – beautiful: the early ones green bronze, and women with finned backs, or triangles enamelled, lights like Brooklyn Bridge, and rhymes from Dylan on the rims. The later years – are funerary pottery: a comb for three hairs, a watch without a stem, tribal jetons. Nothing to commemorate. Humanised the world, and so condemns it to our own organic death – the functions winding down, domesticity becoming sparse. And finally, the last year: a little temple bell, a nut for clapper. Tintintin. Is anybody out there?

‘Well, but, Thistle – suppose even this challenge is met, postponed, and we are not the cousins of the dinosaur. Suppose the group, as yet anonymous, survives, and you and yours have long gone down – but we go on, the species limping in one tall actor’s hi-tech boot, the other foot is bare, eaten by leprosy ...

‘Well, Thistle, if there is the end of the world, at least you will still have the island.’

‘Exactly. Fortunately, and damn it, we shall have the island.’

Hope repeats itself, eternal theme and variations. What a bore! What ennui. Cat and mouse and mouse and cat, spring and fall, and fall and Fall and spring and spring of cat.

I regret I find his politics boring; really, embarrassingly boring. He later tells me, ‘I must believe, absolutely, in what I say,’ but to me this island magic was too close to travel ads. The hokum man. Sucking them in, the token people, men in stocking caps, some primal lack, with Thistle’s charisma to rub in, like filling scuffs on leather. Too much talk of nature when he means cement and hotels and hormones frying on the beach, too much of needs when he means Oedipus, crucifying the poor magic donkey once again, back at the heroic crossroads where we once went wrong.

And yet – his fear of fratricide is real, and real in the woods his brother’s hands spread out and dead. It’s not the personal that I object to, but what’s underneath: the going back that doesn’t really move, the search for movement which is being swept along, the search for an identity which, before it’s lost, or changed, is borrowed from a poster.

Again I read his journal:

 

The sky is like thick glass. And the pine an ornament made, perhaps, of cloth, or feathers. The plain a thin crust, and floating high, high above all I have left behind – the people, the sheep. Below me, as I hang here, I hear the sheep, their legions. Knowing mine, each one of mine, feel of the fur on its neck. And the bleat, priestlike. Appalled by secrecy, death, silence. Has come to an end of concealment, concealing the death of others. Deaths waiting in line, that drops out of focus – shades, sheep. The priests like people grieving, shrill and sexless, blunted vocal chords. Seekers of sheep, counters of sheep. Sheep stolen, never lost. Whoever here ever mislaid a sheep?

Lying on my thin plain, my island, terracotta crust booms like a drum. Lying in glass, in thick, hot glass, blue glass above, the plume of tree set in. Beneath there is the sea, the sea of sheep – no waves, just white and baying crests that never break, but endlessly reproduced. The same, unique and breaking voice, that bleats of death, never its own, always of others. Another taken from that dusty line, dusty into the future, disappearing in the blue. Dust, dust thrown up by sheep. Dust of terracotta, this pretended island surrounded by no water, booming like a hollow vessel, waves that are sheep, their bells, their dust, jostling you – even you – into the lines of dead men, dying men, men about to die, who never kill, never resist, but are just made to die. Here on this dry, this suspended island, high in the glass. Trapped in the glass in this vast and locked laboratory where no one from outside can enter. The master glassblower, puffing out this ornament, never returns: cheeks turned into terracotta, a booming instrument no one dares to blow, and quite, quite inelastic.

     I ask my mother, ‘How can I live here – fearing everyone, fearing the moment when I’m killed, or have to kill? If it were the state, if there was war – at least you have a chance to run away, shoot your hand off, maybe. But here, with the vendetta – I kill my cousin, he kills me. And you will send me. You, with your intelligence, and your hope that this will never happen – you will send me out. You will grieve, but I shall kill. Or I will die, and you will find the person to avenge me – a grandson, and you’ll be there to grieve, to gobble up my children, sending us out and always grieving, bloody grieving. My face blown off, throat cut, or else sent down for life, and coming out a smug and simple man – and zap, through the head, and off we go again.’

She says, ‘Of course I’d never send you. It’s been years now. Even here, people forget, and we make peace. It just takes courage to say no, choose another way. Trust me. With my intelligence.’

But I know. It’s our disease, our special virus. We talk of nothing else, what else could there be to talk of? Fear, of giving offence, or of ignoring it. Without it, we don’t exist: with it, it’s not worth living. Someone will always tell them, at home. At school, they say that you can run away: they make us go to school, so we can run away. ‘Ignore it. Don’t give a shit – in three hours, you’re on the Continent. All that holds this place together is sheep, being macho, and carrying a gun.’ But on the Continent I’m nothing, a runaway, for having reacted to – nothing. Done nothing.

Trapped in this glass. At war. Everyone’s my enemy. The dark night, doesn’t take a step back. Doesn’t even hear your incan­tations. No pity. Even the dark’s afraid, and has no face to show it – total mask. A dog’s life with the sheep.

Blood black family. A value to defend? Black king, red queen, red king black queen: they know the one-step perfectly.

I don’t want to play that game. Don’t want you to do anything for me, to me. At all. Not intercede, not play all these biblical tricks, the bad Cain, and not the fucking priests either. You can play out your primal role, of good power, bad power, sacrifice.

Play at being provoker, or avenger; but no one plays at being victim. I understand vendetta perfectly, the doing down, the stabilising, defending honour, gambling and losing, keeping the others out, keeping ourselves together. How natural it is! Nothing perverse or dulled here, nothing to resist or even to reject, just cowardice to think – that’s my own throat, or guts, or head, hanging open or blown away. We have a virus, inside and raging, virus of being human, same one that outside they celebrate and envy.

I need a cure for being human. Others, outside, have found it. Don’t steal sheep, spit in other people’s beer, don’t snoop and sneak, and lurk and take aim, and brave the night, and kill with all the trappings, and the cousins, and all the compromises that the silences enjoin, the confidences snooped and sneaked. The police who jostle us as if we’re sheep. Murderous sheep.

 

I had begun to think that if the price of normality was to join the police, then it was too high. And yet, approximately, the gesture seems to be required, if only to get a better grip on what is deviant. After Brazil, it is good to have the sides so neatly drawn, where one’s mind was having chronic problems. And yet – poor Thistle – a burden of such concentration, fear that drives out passion, a sentence that for its loneliness (not to mention lack of fault) beats even the good doctor Bhad’s. For some are born to suffer – my doctor friend, and the Trotskyist Adnan, now commissioning ephemeral monuments for his government. And some to missionise, like the Reverend Jones, even like the contract carpenter – men of enthusiasm, even of misinformation. But Thistle bears a heavy lump inside.

 

 

 

 

three

 

 

That first day, Thistle and I watched the people in the square. throwing tiny horseshoes at a stick. They did not ask us to join in. It was peaceful. From the ravine came a rin-tin-tin from the auto-wreckers’, and a clok-clok from sheeps’ bells.

I returned to the barracks. Now that the state was women, my fear of authority, well underpinned, was troubled by a fear of women, which I’d never had. Another, gratuitous organic quirk was pressing on me. I tried to explain to Nadia, the inspector, but she said, ‘Of course we don’t hate you. It seems you’ve done nothing wrong.’ I was irritated. I didn’t know what to do. Nothing was expected of me.

Nadia showed me photographs of separatist demonstrations. The line of people blew out their cheeks rounded, occluded their eyes, and stuck their tongues out. They looked more like peasant pots or gourds than arses.

‘What do you make of that?’

‘Rhetoric,’ I told her.

A police rider, decomposing into the tubes of her motorcycle, injured, perhaps dead. ‘And this?’

‘It looks very urban, lay. I see the movement as more rural, ritual.’

She showed a heap of books, dourly smouldering.

I said, ‘Rejection of yesterday’s identity. Today’s is more ephemeral, on disk.’

I thought, ‘It’s all Teutonic, spring rites.’

Nadia had said, ‘You mustn’t think of me as a person, I’m your inspector,’ and I had replied, ‘Brazil has messed me up, perhaps for good. An ineradicable lightness of judgement ...’ and I thought of Chiara on the mainland saying, ‘Terrorism. Arsefaces. Atavism. And it’s all your province,’ while I objected, ‘But not my responsibility, and it’s a rather little province.’

Nadia said: ‘I wonder if you are right for us? This isn’t just natural selection going on, life bubbling up – the cult of ancestors, the sheep, and then the killing. On to bombs and drugs, the rest of us, our civility, being torn apart. I wonder if you’ve quite made up your mind.’

I say to Thistle, later: ‘You rather misled me. I understand your wish not to be a victim, a victim of your culture, of your mother – even worse. Though to the outsider, there is something here that sounds slightly comic. But, with your resources as they are, your rebellion is a little thin. And Darya, it seems, is a designer, Bozo is in the maquis with his gun, and Cecilia plays both sides. Are you all running, are you falling? Remember Nemesis – who no doubt came here for rest and recreation too.’

He says, ‘Darya is a beautiful person. Not like one born and growing here. The first ones – the originals – can’t have risen up from nothing, from the sand, like brown worms or tubers. Maybe they were slaves who, jumping ship, could then not bear the sea, that represented danger. Seeing the beauty of the shore, the beaches, as a paradise, enjoyed in death, in life to be avoided. A threat.

‘The sea. The danger always comes from the sea.’

I tell him, ‘I come from the sea myself. Perhaps they had built kilns in Egypt – they build so smoothly. And they never break the earth. Water they guarded, and the stones, the grass, the pines, the granite. These they worked, dressed up as bulls. But never planted, never broke through the surface. Yes, certainly, slaves and temple slaves.’

He continues, spaced out, ‘And kept the fucking sheep. No music but their own breaths, their arms spread out to carry the sound, their hands a resonator. And other tribes coming, some from the earth, some from the sea, some from the fountains where the smooth stones never represent an animal, a deity – only a shell, a pine frond. And never broke the earth, never drew a line on it or dropped a seed, and never wrote, left an inscription. Never left a word, and never have, even after the priests came to take their minds off it.’

‘Off what?’

‘Being victims, being hunted, being slaves, running away.’

‘Some kind of spell?’

‘What we all carry, like an extra patch of skin, a virus from our parents. That we all carry, and is not being together, and not being individual, but perhaps is stuck in some special way of being slaves, of having run away and never being freed: of being in some way our own master, and so subjected, and not able to be freed. Subjected to our own blood. And so we kill. We kill each other, we are made to kill – our brothers, or, to be precise, our cousins and our uncles. We kill and so cause the most intimate pain to those who’re closest. But it can never be enough, because we know – the dead cannot feel the pain, and we live unfeeling with the dead. Make everyone fear the utmost every day – the youngest and the ablest. And we say we’re not cruel, not savage. And I think it’s often true. Slaves always kill horribly, and always other slaves. Never the masters. Here, there aren’t any.

‘And the remedy – to run away again. To become really nothing, lose ourselves completely. Zero people.’

I move about this village easily. I think being close to the sheep keeps passions in check, though at night I see the village streets full of tossing blankets, red eyes; of thousands of sheep. In the bars I am jostled at times, people try to tread on my feet, but compared with Brooklyn it is easy to ignore. At night I hear shooting, and Nadia tells me there are attempts to break into the barracks, but I tell her that compared with Brazil, they are clearly not trying.

Sometimes the villagers blow out their cheeks when they see me, like gourds, and this is the most irritating of all. The legends now are told by the wealthy – the clerks from the post office, the man from the gas station: about Cybele, and the stones that trace the outlines of the pyramids, fixed deep down, in the woods, to basalt layers, brought here – who knows? All lies. And the ‘ambassadors’ who were hired to kill the terminally sick, and came at night with sticks shod with copper. I asked, ‘Why didn’t the doctors do that?’ ‘There were no doctors.’

It was not remotely like Paraguay. At times, for quiet, I’d take my pistol to the woods and hear it boom back like a cannon off the granite cliffs. One morning I found in the street outside a sheep caught in a cement form, its foot broken in two places, belly up. My landlord said, ‘Usually we dig a pit, and put the carcase in and leave it, wrapped in hay, a week, ten days – the heat of its putrescence cooks it through, till it’s as soft as butter.’ But I couldn’t quite believe him, and we killed it in the normal way, and I said, as I always do, ‘Poor beast’, and the others laughed and praised my civility and sensitivity.

So between the world of Nadia and her barracks, the villagers – whose runs of contraband and plots I disturbed through my presence – and Thistle’s portentous sedimentations, life passed in its jerky and mysterious way. And Nadia asks, ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘No, no one owes me money, and I’m not shut up inside – those are the things that make me nervous,’ and I make an incantation for the birdlike being of Dr Bhadhyopadhyay and his rookfilled cage, and for my other travelling friends, wishing them all that at least we should avoid, singly or by mischance, being cast into Paraguay.

And Nadia tells me of their life shut up together, of the phono­gram that said, ‘They have abolished the motorcar’, and not knowing if it referred to all of Europe or was a spoof decree of Thistle’s, and how they laughed from nervousness, and at the Chief Inspector saying, ‘Darya is not a name that gives me confidence.’ And it seemed good that on this murderous patch where the priests flap in their frocks from burial to theatre group, and the young toughs go mutely down to knife and gun, there should be cops like Nadia. I ask her, ‘Did passing exams mean so much to you, then?’

‘I wanted to be around when justice was done.’

There is no history. There is no time, but many times. There is no end, but there was a beginning. There are many gods – their lives are much shorter than ours. Rock and roll is the link between closed, or closing, societies, and the childish chaos of the personal. Nature will bury us: there is no human nature. If we are exploited, we can walk out the door. There is no door. But neither are there any walls.

I say to her, ‘The people here need help, making the jump from tough traditions into darkness – most are just dropping down.’

‘The old world cannot hold them, here, the new world is a dump. But we must stop the killing.’

I say, ‘But if they want to kill you too, then you’re the problem too, and not the cure. And they can’t leave, not all of them, for if they do, their group is dead – and that’s a cruel and silly thing.’

She asks me, ‘And how will you mediate? Or will you just hope, and count the bodies?

I know – it ends with all the people dead. The questions have all been posed before, and never being able to frame or answer them in new ways means in the end the same.

And Nadia is a fine, a modern person.

But I remember battles. Cannons. The Stones played very loud. And people falling, going down. And was all this intended, willed, thought out? In its broad lines, – yes it was: the killing not the worst of it. Requisitions of spare parts, lectures on Friday afternoons, the canteen specially disinfected – military. Stuff like that.

But – that was that. I am not the I that was. Everything is changed: and I am born again, grey hopper from grey hopper, the old skin like a shroud is left behind in Asia somewhere. Yessir. Last time – for anarchy, and now, if not for order, at least a makeshift kind of neatness.

Jones is safe: he frightens the others. And Dr Bhad is safe because he’s locked away for ever – and sends me postcards giving Sanskrit clues on where to start my tunnelling. The carpenter and the minister worry me with their precariousness: doing things, making things – you never know. And Nadia’s moving towards an intersection – she and her comrades know that something’s wrong.

Perhaps it’s me, a foreign body, disordered, without orders, taking and hating all too seriously this policing business, when what matters is – last one in’s to lock the door.

Nadia moves towards her intersection: herself manipulating the lines of the fine sight, herself the marksman and the target. We sit on the mountain, high above the village, which lies in the dust like a grey bull with a lasso of road around its neck, the end held in an absent hand, down in the valley. We watch the drama of some little birds, and I try to avoid empathy with them.

Far, far below, there seem more fires.

Nadia watches me with eyes like glue. The smell of burning thickens, the smell of burning pasture, but we’re too high up here for smoke to reach us, or the sound of bells. Behind us on a tree there hangs a long brown smock, it’s like a husk. She says, ‘They used those when they robbed the herds.’ Below, the columns of cars nose about, like ants: some look for stolen sheep. Some set the fires. Or take a shepherd home from work. Take clean underwear to Bozo in his hide.

We lie together on the sand, sand under the pines, sand where there has never been the sea, or sound of water – the fountain rising and muffled between deep stones.

Nadia says, ‘We must be prepared for nights of fires,’ but I remember, ‘I’ve shot off all my ammunition.’ The remark falls harder than I meant. It brings out all our differences.

She says, ‘We stay in the barracks because we don’t want to use ours.’ It seems to me a statement of great moral courage, but I can’t see why. She says, ‘The fires burn all the structures: jobs, independence. They have to buy in town, to feed the sheep. And then – its all manoeuvring. Everyone is into everything, chasing their own tails and gnawing them. Or musical chairs – the desperate ones must leave, or fight.’

I think, ‘Or join a gang’, but this would spoil the elegiac mode. I know if I lived here, I’d join a gang, and live in noisy limbos, like the Revd. Jones and Mr Bhad. Wait in the frightening dark, up on the hills, for space ships landing.

 

 

* * *

 

 

I say to Nadia, ‘Islands peopled with women, especially those on the side of order – like Circe, pops into mind – have a pec­uliar resonance. But perhaps your orders make things difficult, reverse the questions rather, as to who are the enchantresses, who the pigs,’ but the pleasantry, if pleasantry it is, shoots past her. I remember goldmines where there is perpetual snow – places without mystery, and very hot and flammable. She says, ‘Your friend on the Continent, Chiara, is always trying to get you thrown out. Not transferred, but fired.’ Of course: a moment’s prevision – and the song ‘Fire in the Mine’ unscrolls on the mind. It might have been ‘Fire in the Mind’. I say, ‘That’s really too bad, I thought I was navigating the narrows of this career like a wizard,’ but in fact I’m glad. To succeed as cop would mean forsaking Dr Bhad, even aligning with the Reverend Jones – already a tough strait for loyalties, discriminations.

‘Chiara is very professional,’ I say.

‘She’s certainly very vindictive.’

I change the subject. I tell Nadia I have spoken to Darya, and that she is ‘part of the families that kill, but is not criminal’, as we put it. Though money soon becomes part of the system. ‘Darya is full of phrases like, “cutting science down to size”, and “kitsch in nature”, which sound very fine, but it’s all about clothes. She breaks with the family, designing clothes that they can’t wear. Or afford.’

‘What kind of break is that?’ asks Nadia. To me, I can’t imagine breaks more radical. I say, ‘Playing jazz banjo in Buenos Aires is a break from broking stocks in Montreal,’ but she says, ‘She still lives here, with them. No change of fashion, or of fad, will get her out.’

I tell her, ‘She’s attached to Thistle, but won’t sleep with him. I can’t blame her. But it establishes a kind of transcendental link, or so it seems.’

‘New York’ is what Nadia calls me when I suggest there are connections in more than one dimension. I say, ‘Darya was more attached to Bozo, but when he was mixed up in the kidnapping and the bank job, and then those edgy transgressions with the tourists—’

Nadia interrupts. ‘Tomorrow we’re going on a raid, we think we’ve tracked down Bozo’s lair.’

‘How exciting,’ I say. ‘Who did the snitching?’

‘The information came from Cecilia, the motive – jealousy. To get at Darya, or so we think.’

My friends are caught, alone, at breakfast, answer the door thinking the postman has at last brought – ah! Another uniform, bureaucracy that never finishes. Except, perhaps, for Dr Bhad.

But Bozo will have all the fireworks. Bits of sheep everywhere.

 

 

* * *

 

 

I sink into the deep, never moistened nets of my hosts’ lives. A man where I live, a carpenter, asks, ‘Why did you join the police?’

‘I had no money. Couldn’t make a go of crime.’

‘You’re not much of a policeman either.’

‘Well,’ I tell him, ‘I’m courageous as a fox, and full of moral courage.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘your aim’s good. I’ve spied on your practising.’ I tell him about my other carpenter friend. ‘He’s this fixation on Arabs.’

‘Arabs can’t whittle.’

I agree. ‘That’s why my friend gets so many contracts.’

It is the wrong response. ‘Arabs don’t believe in contracts. That’s why they’re above us. And why you can’t trust them.’

‘I have another friend who’s doing life.’

He brightens. ‘I have many, many friends who are doing life. And I have many, many enemies who are doing life.’

‘And the dead?’

‘The same. Friends, and enemies. We are closer to the dead than you are. We go early every morning to see them, and talk to them.’

I know. Sometimes I come too, but I’m always disappointed. 

He says, ‘Life is made of little things, joined together, and spiralling. It goes back to the past, like a helix, and goes to the future. My grandfather’s offence becomes my life sentence. It goes through so many trivial things: weddings, the natural deaths, the things you do to assert yourself, and sometimes find you’ve stumbled into other offences. And then you make your friends, you see the degrees of faith they have in you. And you keep quiet, you watch, at times you tremble. It’s like a dance, a music that builds through many modes, but the little things aren’t sweet and beautiful. It may be – to kill a horse. To take a shot at someone. To hide something that’s been stolen, or someone who needs hiding. Or even lending money.’

‘Lots of money?’

He gestures to show it bundled like leaves on a cave or cellar floor. It is hard not to gesture picking some up.

I say, ‘And so, it’s like a web, a web bigger and more splendid, or more awful, more viscous, digesting, acid, than the life of each of you?’

‘Of us. Of you too.’

I say, ‘I don’t belong to that kind of group.’

‘You don’t? You are so sure?’

I ask, ‘Is this design – the accumulation of the things – the chance, the duty, the constraint, the hurting, being hurt – why you don’t make things, don’t draw, or carve?’

He considers this for a long time. ‘But I do carve.’ I cannot say, ‘Yes, but I don’t like it, nor think it very good.’

Instead, I say, ‘Usually people who are cruel conceal it, or pretend they aren’t afraid,’ and he continues, ‘But if you don’t fear being hurt, and know when you are cruel – then what’s the point?’

True – that’s how I think. But not how Nadia thinks.

 

 

 

 

four

 

 

Instead of smoking Bozo out, we were ourselves burnt out. The ‘night of the fires’ involved – they said, we said – a settling of old scores, but also a manifestation, organised, of some transversal organisation. We – they – said it must be Thistle, co-ordinating protests against the weather (the pastures were singed and sandy), a stepping-up of family wars, and something else. The girls in the Castle – as I called the women in the barracks – called for ‘massive reinforcements’. And Nadia said, ‘Those girls in armour don’t fool around.’ We saw them circling in their vehicles, peering in the doorways of the bars, driving the lads almost mad with emulation and vainglory.

All night the fires burned, the little tanks rattled here and there, sheep poured over walls. I remembered a school exper­iment about communicating vases, and sheep finding their own level. Excited, we organised small spots of confusion into larger dramas. I thought I saw Cecilia, doing her journalism, snapping away at the little flames – no bigger than the ones on cult cards of Japanese deities – her camera and the gunsights seeing coolly what we guessed at. If she had tipped us off about Bozo, she had compensated by concealing the fire-setting – while giving him a laugh. I laughed myself, it being dark, tumultuous, a night of shipwreck on the land, the phosphor on the rigging, or perhaps the whole thing going down, soaked in pitch, spilt rum and oatmeal. Going up in flames, and down into the waves – a wreck without a storm, and yet the figures, hooded, in their smocks, starting and fighting fires, had an inquisitorial air. They seemed like Goya’s spirits, of war, of punishment, or just of torture, setting the fire so that it burned the heretic’s feet, his soles but leaving free his soul to find a vent: and shout, and roar, and prophesy, repent, scream with pain. Whatever.

When I saw Thistle next, he blew his cheeks out like a gourd, as the islanders do, the booming sound accompanying their songs. I was irritated. It seemed a childish gesture – below the level required of him, required by me.

He looked terrible. ‘Darya has at last broken free. Never more urgent, more alive—’

‘Well, she’s dead now.’

She had been run over by a tank, as she slept, after – they said – she and Thistle had made love.

‘That’s not possible,’ he said. ‘The noise.’

‘One of the new quiet types,’ I said.

Impossible to tell if he’s bearing extra sorrow, extra news today. He said quietly, ‘She was content. She had decided. She couldn’t live with Bozo, and she couldn’t stand me. I was happy for her, for her wisdom. When you try to lead many people, some will always pull their own way.’

‘You’re sure you’re leading? Not just being followed?’

‘Lay off me,’ he said. ‘Nothing to see but what you see.’ I asked. ‘You know you have planned and committed a crime?’ – and added, ‘But so did we, though perhaps a lesser one.’

He looked surprised: ‘How do you come into it?’

‘The tanks. The armed women. Forces of order. You must have seen them, if Darya didn’t.’

He said, ‘You don’t come into it. Or maybe, maybe you do – but not the others.’

‘Why me? And why won’t Darya’s family react?’

He said, ‘React? Of course they will react. But do you think they’ll take on the continent? They’ll discuss, then they’ll react – knowing their powers, but necessarily      overestimating them a little.’ But why me?

Thistle said, ‘You have very strong protection here, on both sides. First, the Castle protects you, but you also come under my own. A very strong, a personal recommendation. As you should know.’

‘I want no protection, no recommendation. I seek the truth, freedom to speak or not decide.’

He said, ‘You can’t avoid your friends. And at the moment, Reverend Jones is the key between three heavy doors. And we have many things in common, though in other ways we are indifferent or hostile.’

‘Which are?’

‘Jones has a stand on drugs that fits in with our own, and for the moment, has convinced the government. We have a magic island,’ and he laughed, ‘So drugs are unnecessary. And in return for our policing of the trade, the government gives us space. But not so much.’

‘But Jones is a freak, a sideshow, – a laugh a minute, but whereas on a boat he’s fun, surely—’

‘Exactly. A man of great power and charm.’ He searches out the word as if he’s looking for a patch of his own skin, to slice off as a graft. ‘Charisma. And he’s your friend. Congratulations.’

I said, ‘I don’t need protection,’ and Thistle said gloomily, ‘We never know what we need. We saw you last night, hopping about in the flames like a sauced-up mantis.’

‘Trying to give a hand, now to the left, now to the right.’ But had it been love that Thistle and Darya had had time for – that she should fail to notice even the quietest of the tanks? – though that I knew was what we said.

And Thistle said, ‘Friend Jones dislikes this kind of accident, though in this case, if doubts there are, they should be left to run.’

‘But Jones is a racist, a paranoid.’

Thistle said, ‘I hate racism, though it can be useful. But as for political qualities – I see paranoia as among the highest.’

Everything is twisted here. I think of myself as clever, even as flesh and blood (I pinch myself to make the point) – but to them I’m a cartoon character. Well, I think, if Jones has turned up trumps – if trumps is what this pasteboard existence is – what can I hope for Dr Bhad, another man of immense powers, awaiting the magic word, the lawyer like a Batman powering in with injunction and a proof of misdirection? I have mentioned Bhad to Thistle, who remarks, ‘He’s probably making more than all of us put together’ – which might, I now see, be true. And where does Thistle’s money come from? When I ask, he laughs, and says, ‘Here we’re very hospitable. Everyone treats everyone else.’

At the police meeting, I say, ‘The responsibility for Darya’s death ...’ and there is infinite space in front of me. I go on, ‘An autopsy …’

The chief asks angrily, ‘Have you ever had an autopsy done on you? I assure you, a more invasive thing you’ll not experience. Darya is the responsibility of the state, and there’s an end to it. This is the best, the only solution.’

I think – so much for my sad quest for truth, caught up at once in delusions that knowing singular facts can be stuck together like bits of clay to make truth pudding. I have become too much a policeman. Nadia says, ‘The family will have the body,’ and there is vigorous nodding, and she smiles at me to show she’s saved me.

I am about to say – but if we are not the state, then how come we’ve all got guns and armoured cars? And then I think, well, most people here have guns. And if Darya was killed by some personal interlink of circumstances and fears, then in a way an accident gives it an aesthetic shape. One might say, it designs her life: as she might have said, wearing a top hat with your bib and brace signifies all power to the workers, now and unmediated.

And after, Nadia says, ‘The state is made for this. It’s impersonal, and absorbs without a trace.’

I answer, ‘No wonder it’s marketed commercially,’ but she doesn’t see the irony, if irony there is. She goes on, ‘And your friend Jones would feel a pact was being broken if we started blaming Thistle.’

‘When I knew Jones, he was cursing the sun – for getting him out of bed, or setting and condemning him to go back to it. As a Prince, he was deficient.’

‘Perhaps he was a prince of darkness,’ says Nadia lightly. ‘Anyway, he may be soft on separatism, but he’s hard on drugs, and that’s why we can accept the both of you.’

I protest, ‘He thinks Arabs and orientals want to destroy what he calls “our sort” with drugs. And of course he hates the limited liability states – they tax him, harass him until he pays their ten per cent. But that is not at all why I have an open mind ...’ But she’s stopped listening.

To pass off all the blame, if blame there is, to the tanks and to the girls in armour is injustice to the dead. And it lets Thistle off, whom I don’t like, mon semblable. My brother some time against the state. But I see I’m being sucked in, as Nadia said would happen. ‘That’s why we have those meetings you don’t go to,’ she says, ‘Defining our position towards women, and as women, not to other things.’

I object, ‘Darya was a woman,’ but Nadia says, ‘Yes, but a tank. What can you say to a tank? To a tank, you’re just dead meat.’

     

 

* * *

 

 

A postcard comes from Dr Bhad, stamped ‘from the office of the director’, and I think perhaps with some magic dish he’s turned the tables, changing one life sentence for another preferable one, as prison head: but no – ‘My basic position doesn’t change. But there is a move to make those with most experience of the life here take more formal responsibility for what goes on. So – keep on tunnelling towards me, your old friend: be a good mole, and when I call you, you must surface.’

I say, ‘Everyone sets great store by my silence or my intervention’ and Nadia agrees – ‘Of course. That’s why we want you here, and why Chiara wants you gone. You have to learn, in this policeman’s game, seeking your identity and other people’s truth, when to keep quiet and when to speak. And that is all. It’s quite an easy profession when you get that straight.’

I say, ‘Don’t forget, these are prickly paths for me. My experience in Brazil was of a great, even a historic, failure, a disaster for mind and action. A great defeat.’

‘That’s not what the Brazilian police say. They say you were a pain in the neck.’

‘I didn’t know the Brazilian police had necks.’

Nadia continues, ‘Of course I – we – don’t care what they say, why should I? But that Inspector Chiara is always going on about it. I find you confused – for a man, perhaps the most confused I’ve met.’

I am irritated. ‘I don’t feel at all confused, and certainly gender has no part here. As for the police there – it’s their structures that make them think of pistoleros and private armies all the time. Not that they don’t exist. The confusion was theirs, if they’d given cover where I needed it...’

She looks impressed, but superficially. ‘Tell me about Chiara.’

‘Nothing. We fell into a grave. I behaved like a gentleman, an old trouper, and she may feel some professional resentment.’

‘But you know nothing of this, or any, profession.’

I say, ‘Then I’m at a loss.’ But perhaps the pivot after all is Jones, dramatically ungentlemanly, between New Scotland Yard and Downing Street. His fear of oriental poisons – and then Dr Bhadhyopadhyay, his companion, world expert in the dirty tricks of pharmacy. I mention this to Nadia, who just says, ‘I don’t like hot food,’ and I say, ‘And very wise – you never should accept a dish from Dr Bhad.’ But – unless Thistle and his friends have found some Mediterranean magic mushroom – how would all this fit together? A cuisine, not just of opposites, but of those contraries that make you ill, and not just soul sick, sick to death, but the real fear and trembling, vomiting, and soon to see again all those from Berkeley, and from East and North. Sadly missed, but a reunion to be shunned, like Bhad’s special Madras.

And yet – the old comrades, from those years when all America was at Berkeley, all the America that you would wish to recognise. The old comrades, all gone down, or nearly, bearers of untellable histories, unowned, unparented, the tall tales born aloft like obé masks. I say to Nadia, ‘I hear it’s been turned into a university now,’ but she thinks I’m talking about the CIA, and wonders how I could have graduated.

‘Enough about my mental powers. I could have been a world-class criminal, had I not been questing for a truth of many colours, twisting in the breeze like a universal rally of prayer flags, a convention of the world’s paint samples.’

We look down from our mountain on the world. The pastures are scorched black like funerary pottery. Someone – it might be Thistle – is riding a mule into the brush. He might be looking for Bozo. It is like an animated picture of the flight into Egypt – a still life with one moving figure. We watch the birds, and I say to Nadia: ‘If we were forced to live in a tree, we would do the same: lay an egg. Sing a song. Guard the egg. Quarrel over a beetle. Curse our luck the egg was addled.’ Nadia says, ‘We have our culture,’ and indeed, I reflect on Dr Bhad’s prodigious knowledge of substances, and Jones saying one night as he slithered into his kind of drunkenness, ‘The Arabs take drugs to make them see further, they sell us the ones that make you mad.’ But I was lucid and could see far, far away, down to the cemetery where they were burying Darya, the women in black and the priest, looking like an assembly of crows with a jackdaw, and discrete police darting into hideyholes like jays in their smart blue and peach uniforms, straight off a recruiting poster. I could see a long smear, down the escarpment, where the dead flowers from the cemetery were dumped – primary colours, imitating plastic. I think how easy it is to make cheap shots against our culture, though the birds don’t bother about theirs. And I think, ‘If Bozo did what he said he did, Thistle should be at Darya’s funeral, not seeking refuge, still less Bozo. Unless he fears that someone knows, and will start looking for him.’

To Nadia I say, ‘We should talk to Cecilia, since she knew what would happen,’ and she replies, ‘In Brazil you must have learnt to be a genius,’ and it occurs to me I should have been at the funeral too, but stayed away because I didn’t know her well. What I knew told me I should not have been so silent.

 

 

 

 

five

 

 

I have lost my credibility with myself. An expedient – becoming a policeman – has turned into a whole central Europe of particularities and implausibilities, a glass web where everyone knows everything but sees their knowledge constantly misapplied or codified, or just turned upside down. Situations that concentrate the incongruency recur: first Chiara, and then Nadia, from discussing the trials of being an inspector, and the examinations she must pass, sticks her long tongue in my ear. ‘Just fooling around, trying you out’, she says, pleased with the effect. I know in the States the men cops are always doing that with guns, but there is a challenge of a different kind – and much less effective.

We are going to interview Cecilia, about the new imperialism in the island. I say, ‘A soft imperialism, everything paid for, the natives are bought out, made unemployed – and other dispossessed come in as tourists.’ I feel Cecilia must have seen the moistness on my ear. Cecilia is in sharper analytic form: ‘The new imperialism must be concrete, since that’s its favourite material. It covers the whole island – the shores, the beaches, streams, the pastures. Pushes us back to the interior, conceals the sea we fear with lidos running round the island. And we become once more the fierce aboriginals of the interior. Subject to family, more dependent. Desperate.’

‘How desperate?’ I ask.

‘First we turn on each other, like the stressed rats in the classic, tiny cage. Then, reasoning out of our dilemma, we band together. Defend ourselves. Even break out.’

Nadia says, making a suggestion, ‘Or even settle down, just like the rest of us?’

‘They can’t recruit us all as soldiers or policemen. But do we expect the pastoral civilisation to continue? Is tourism just the other dispossessed having a two week break, pushing the autonomous to the margin? Thistle says in the long run, all defence is hopeless. But in the short run, it produces spectacular effects. And so it did, it does.’

I say, ‘What interests me is not the rub of surrender and resist­ance. It’s the new systems that underlie these transactions, that may make them all explode. Drugs, for instance. Just suppose there was no more profit in them. That a couplet from the Koran could give the same effect, but neat and wholesome. No more seeing gherkins four metres high coming into breakfast, calling you Pop.’ Nadia is staring, so I say, ‘No, I never eat breakfast.’

Cecilia pulls at her skirt again. She has a mind and body problem – mind is good but body finds it alien to wear these journalist’s clothes.

She says, ‘Yes, drugs are a perfect currency because they don’t break the circle, just help it along, give it a value for book-keeping purposes. Because drugs in people are spent, extinguished, burned off, not turned into goods. So the real system is something else.’

I say again, ‘That’s what interests me. The complexity of the whole system, the whole illegal system and its powers that underlies the simple, oppressive legal system and its powers. Magic – not concrete – imperialism: that’s my passion.’

I should not have said it.

Cecilia says, ‘Black hands.’

I think of Arabs in the desert, dancing and drumming informally: the men casual as storks, their hands hidden in their sleeves. The women drumming, fingers and nails blackened, and on the palms, as they make their nods and smiles to little desert things – a line of birds, a flurry in the sand, a city wall remembered, a passage that remembers roses – an oblong, a triangle, a simple rune. ‘Black hands,’ I repeat. ‘Real Arabs, pretending to remember a before, a something lost, that’s really future, a something they don’t want to find. Cities not lost, but terrible, to come: and not roses, but standing in line for crack.’

Nadia is reassured by my moralism and romanticism. Though it does not fit well with police work.

Cecilia says, ‘Well, yes, Arabs. But many others, other peoples, other areas. In the end, they will come in to work, the others will be free – to go on holiday.’

I remember my carpenter, searching for Arabs in unlikely places. Perhaps refining the Koran to find the couplets that will blow the mind but leave the industrial capacities intact, and so be cost effective. I say, ‘But the island is economically destroyed – no one would come to work here.

Cecilia stares at us, as if she is deciding to tell the truth. Or as if she is inventing a story. ‘Drugs by the ton, collected at points on land. But as a system it was weak. The users were too weak and poor, the pushers were the same. That part started with the poor, and ended there – and so the real cycle needed other things extraneous: guns and joint stock companies. It was a kind of early conquest, acted out by ghosts in eighteenth-century costume. Now, the routes are seaborne. Perfect – off the island here, no one is watching. And labour power, not pills and powder. Whole segments of the desert stripped of people. Not by erosion or pollution. Shipped up and out. A new hidden proletariat, to replace the European one that couldn’t make it with old Marx.’

I finished for her, ‘But is becoming keen on holidays, industrial food and bevelled beaches, neatly cemented off.’

I thought, ‘I want to discuss how Darya was beaten into rubber in a leather sack. By whom. And by whom left under the tank. And to make. clear that all this rubbish of the Arabs is another try to suck me in, because of that old carpenter, just as the Reverend Jones and his fantastic interventions leaves me looking like the supreme captain of the black hands. I feel a very heavy pressure on me, and it takes all my resoluteness to put it all down to sacrifice, giving everything up, after that historic, cosmic failure down in Brazil ...’     

I stare at Cecilia: her face is white, almost to the point of green attacking at the edges, like a stone fallen from the moon and with a chip of nose added in Crete, and shipped hither and thither round our sea. Now, with her unstoppable technology, she has gone back to primal directness and simplicity, the word made stone, or silica. Lying her head off. Betraying Darya, protecting Thistle, sucking in my carpenter in Qom, and, in the last resort, Adnan, who seems to take to suits and briefings, though on board our ship he favoured kaftans and the pamphlet.

Nadia’s eyes are very black, aslant her witch’s nose: they wink at me, perhaps involuntarily to ‘put Cecilia on ice’. We can think of nothing more to ask that does not unthaw a fresh glacier of fantasy. She packs up her gear, a portable collection. of lawyers and notaries, leaves us with our frauds’ Entschlossenheit, the resoluteness that we too are called, though with little fuss, to use in dubious though modest causes.

When Cecilia has left, Nadia tells me I have been promoted, and am now a unit. ‘To prevent us being replaced by squads of men’, she says, ‘You are to become our monstrous regiment of one.’

It is not at all what I want. The pressure is increasing, and I too would like to take refuge in my sensibility and my history, but I have sacrificed this too. I could not renounce being born in America – the frontier guards say ‘dogs must belong to someone, barking is not enough of proof’, so I’m an American dog, and belong to all the others. But seeking truth, though second best, no doubt, means giving up identities too, since every slice of truth involves the sacrifice of ignorance, a bit of what has made life worth living up till then. And Brazil taught that truth is also failure, which I suppose is something and not nothing.

But I have – or have had – Nadia in my ear, and Chiara on my back, with phonograms querying my loyalty. And from all this it seems that I shall not be paid, and this seems to mean that in some formal way Nadia is my husband, though nothing is required of that, since she is shut at night in barracks. And overall, it was more peaceful to be wandering along at sea, wondering where to land and where adventures would begin.

I feel I should rather steal than be put on Nadia’s payroll. And yet perhaps I am mistaken. These continental people, after all, live by rhetoric, and so action is a coup, a dramatist’s accident. The adversary is identified and speared by language – not by real tongues: and so, if death or wounding happens, it breaks with the convention, is a baroque foot piercing the ceiling, a plaster nose stuck on the canvas, just a comment on form. So, though on the continent it is the deaths that make life all worth living, and it is from them that dialogue is born, in fact, there are not many of them. And so, it’s where the rhetoric of adversaries not just breaks down, but is permanently replaced by action, that we find a black, a bad community: Palermo, Naples.

And so, as well as with democracy and the decline of manufactured things, poor Nadia must do battle here with people whose words and actions go in different ways. I’m used to liars, whereas she knows only intrigue, which is a different thing. A rule, like the one the carpenter says the Arabs have, and admires them for it.

And musing in this way, trying to leave nothing out, hunched over at the bar, a typical grey hopper’s afternoon, I do not hear the pair come in, and scarcely feel them as they clamp my arms, pinning at the elbows, lifting me like a wooden indian from the store front (a reflex putting down my drink unspilled), and driving off with me. This village is looking like my memory: without places and things – for what they have is nondescript, and wearing away. But it does belong to me, without substance, chance and carelessly jumping up, also nondescript: this place is my memory. I’m amused by being kidnapped: I know them all by sight, and they are shaken by my good humour. Afterwards I add to the chance this is a joke the other chance – that they mean to kill me, since they are unmasked.

‘This is your prison.’

‘It is a noble grave.’ An underground fountain in a chamber, made by the ancestors, brown, ferny, damp. We mostly talk of what we have eaten. Speculate on life in the barracks, how much policemen earn, and why they don’t go in for banditry. It is a threat, but also bonds. It prepares you for the real time, and meanwhile we sit around like genuine grave-friends, skeletons clacking of this and that. Discussing cooking, mostly. I say, ‘You look as if you’re practising,’ and they introduce their roles – the go-between, the chief, the hooded jailers, the look-out. They suggest trying out the chains on me, but I stand up and say the joke is going further than I fancy, and in a little while we all go back. My drink is standing on the bar, forensic, and I polish off the evidence. Since they have not established fear between us, they have gone one better – and won my complicity. I do not tell them at the barracks what has happened, and so it becomes a souvenir, a local pleasantry. And it is clear that everyone will know. Thistle will know, if indeed he didn’t plan it, taking me down, a tourist too, to one of the milder, more accessible hells in which the islanders spend their lives, take refuge from the heat, hide stolen sheep, and guns, talk to the newly dead, and suffer as they may the torments which are also part of that compendious memory, the familiar scene that lies around me in the village as I take my morning and my evening walks. Torments from which these quietly descending hells provide relief, torments which are what the villagers no longer hide, and even wish that I could share, the suffering of them being the only way of understanding them.

I say to Nadia, ‘What we are involved in goes outside all politics and institutions. It should be the police are crucial, but we’re as ignorant as the rest. But if not us – and we pretend to believe that life is a romantic search for self-fulfilment, not the memory trap it is for people here – then who will understand? And to be honest, what’s the point of understanding? Who will understand, then? Chiara?’ Nadia tosses her head. ‘My friends, my simulacra on the boat? The big bosses somewhere?’

‘Big bosses somewhere,’ she says.

‘But if it’s all manipulated, or capable of being so,’ I insist, ‘then there is conflict here. No one believes in conflict any more, and so the whole shooting match, from tormented psyche to the execution in the woods, lacks any explanation. Which begins with pointing out that it all lies in dimensions of life we’ve decided not to be equipped for.’

‘But when they break into our world, we’re ready for them, and we punish them,’ says Nadia.

‘Yes, when they speak of crime, crime in our world, we get the message quick, and do our best to do them down. It’s all the rest that we can’t hear. Like supersonic dogwhistles, or people moving in and out of us in more or fewer dimensions.’ And indeed, flocks of two-dimensional sheep are moving up and down the slopes, and we are quite indifferent to them. And we can hear their bells, but not their voices. I feel like Wordsworth, spending his post-revolutionary days chatting to poor and overweight persons at the bus stop – not that Nadia’s overweight, but uniforms tend to strike a mean that ends up chunky, whilst my own clothes have an ideology that’s their own and wild, relating to the higher insects. And I think of Darya and her plans for clothes, the leather sack, the clubs copper-shod, determined, systematic.

So, where to start? It points to Jones, but months of living on the edge in Paraguay, where guessing is no use at all, and everything is instantly obvious – a country compulsory for those who think they like life easy – teach me to say to Nadia, ‘I should go and talk to Chiara, clear things up. Report back to some committees, and all that.’

She looks disappointed, and objects. ‘People here will think you’re running,’ so I say, ‘I’ll tell them all I have to go to London,’ and in the bar where they discuss kidnapping that night I treat them all, my corporal and my jailers, and talk of deals in London. And they wink, and as we all get drunk, we walk out on that causeway of being honest and beginning to give offence and talking of our secret business, names we know, walls we crouched behind, and confidences in extremis and times when we sat in the priest’s place in the confessional (the priest with trouble with his motor in the hills) and heard – not confession, certainly, but a thread of some complicity, a sticky strand of confidences withheld.

In the end, we are convinced we are the biggest criminals in the world. They know, and so do I, that I’m the one that pulls the strings. And yet we all – and I the most of all – have a deep resentment that it’s we who do the work and risk our skins, and there, outside, the big bosses of all kinds and colours, the scarlet and the black – they want us to live lives miserably like this, hunters of men, and hunted in our own hills. Outcasts, bandits, stealers of sheep, killers of our brothers. And they want it so, for their own good and reasonable ends. A deep resentment, that sours and twists, and the little row of men in brown silently swells their cheeks like gourds or empty pots, and mimes a resounding silent challenge to the world.

On my way to Jones I sound out Chiara. It seems that getting rid of me has only personal contours – unless there is some game involved that means she wants more space: or else another candidate, hero, perhaps, of flight and desperate combat, some Joe Ptero­dactyl, some new aspirant anxious to climb up old ropes. She seems, instead, to be more serious. She treats me as an equal: equal to what?

She says, ‘I don’t believe you want to catch guilty people.’

‘Guilt is a terrible feeling.’

‘Not feeling: being,’ she explains. ‘Neither the separatists – who officially we can’t touch. Nor the families – who are nearly everyone. Nor the big operators, who we don’t know who they are.’

‘By big operators you mean the sheep-feed merchants?’

She says, ‘I mean your religious and your Indian friends. Jones is a reactionary, and has good contacts with the Vatican. And they don’t want their friends and enemies disappearing into jail or running off: they like clear categories, interlocutors who don’t change their spots.’

I say, ‘Your theology impresses me. But you overestimate. I’m happy to rub along as a cog in this machine. Brazil disillusioned me. You can trust no one: if you do, they ship you off to Paraguay.’

Chiara is doing well: she has her uniformed servants too, who bring her drinks, and a big board that shows where all the cops have stopped their cars to take a coffee. She says, ‘You made many louche friends in Brazil. Odd for a policeman who has lost his bullets, to make such well-placed chums.’

I am irritated: ‘Ah, I was just putting my network together, and deciding who should go to jail first. And the shepherds set high store by marksmanship.’

‘But you have used, you say, a ton of ammunition.’

‘Practice makes perfect,’ I reply, ‘and on a ton you’re not perfect by any means.’ But she is my enemy, and suspicious.

I see something strange about her mouth, there is a look of Egypt, and it may be the lips have been brought out in the Etruscan style, almost a black, a carmine deepened into terracotta. But it is a rim of coffee, and resoluteness. I make a light remark about Cybele, but it’s clear she is no longer interested in fooling about in sarcophaguses, and indeed to lock that door she says, ‘And you are in the domain of Nadia.’

‘Domain?’

‘It’s an administrative-juridical term,’ she says.

‘That I understood,’ I say. ‘It’s meaning’s what I’m after.’

She loses patience. ‘Let’s forget about the fodder for the sheep, and Nadia, and Darya. Nadia is my comrade, and my sister, after all, and – though I must admit I hate her daughter – she must be the bridge for us.’

The ‘daughter’ surprised me, but I asked, ‘Bridge for what?’

‘From tradition to being, once more, authentic.’

‘You mean, in uniform?’

‘Well, certainly, professionalism is a grey end to reach. But whatever the new age is, it mustn’t be political. Not politicians.’

I see: ‘It mustn’t be Thistle, separatism, starting domination off again? But there are big interests who feel the same, for whom Thistle is a joker. So, in my view, is Jones.’

‘I know that for us, politics brings no liberation.’

It sounds to me intolerably pretentious and portentous. I play my card. ‘But what’s at stake is not liberation and authentic sensibilities, it’s slavery.’

‘That sounds, well, pretentious.’

‘Black hands.’ I lay them on the table, two palms, one with a black oblong, the other a spiral, shell of a sea-snail.

She is dismissing me. ‘You are speaking figuratively?’

‘No. But without evidence.’

Triumphantly, she says, ‘Then what place have you in the police?’

And she is right, for she has given nothing, and taken all my information.

But why the police? I wonder. Why are we speaking of a privileged view, a way of looking over the garden wall of tomorrow? For we are already compromised, we are already cut off by the law. She smiles, and brings back the fragrance of alabaster and formaldehyde: she says, ‘In all my time in this office, it is the first time anyone has mentioned the law.’

 

 

 

six

 

 

England is full of Sikhs resigned to becoming greengrocers. Wealth which means only money, poverty closely scrutinised, in case you might think of romanticising, or even liking it. And in the middle of the sandwich, so much filling. About most things, they have reached a truce – although they argue about this and that: and architecture. They all have had some fright, and now they don’t want any more. But what would I know, sad grey hopper that I am? They seem to say, and say. I admire the ladies with the white, white hair, like birchbark, and I say to Jones, ‘What do they do while waiting for that beautiful white hair, that beats our sheeps’ wool ...’ but he is no longer drowsy, half-sauced friend. He thinks he has summoned me.

‘You are doing good work on the island, but I need results,’ he says.

‘Look Jones, if you know anything at all, you must tell me so I can get your sentence reduced.’ He cracks me a smile, like a mussel easing a valve when the tide turns. He says, ‘After drugs – what? Normalcy? The End? You see my point? We have no idea …’ – he pauses so long, watching the messengers on bikes bring messages in the courtyard far below, I feel he is waiting for one to deliver the end of his remark – ‘… where we are going. To end up.’

I say, to cheer him, ‘Maybe we won’t end up.’

He has not heard. ‘At least to make things comfortable.’

‘Or comfy, as they say here.’

He stares at me: ‘And you, you suggest a fiercely battled future for the species? Do you think you can handle another struggle for survival?’

‘I did well when those Colorados in Paraguay were after us.’ He says, ‘Well, we all did a lot of silly things in Paraguay, though Adnan surpassed all of us. And you were just lucky, because you have a dead eye: Deadeye Zapemall. You even signed in at the hotel with that.’

‘And you swore, Jones, that if you sobered up you’d stop practising religion and believing in God.’

‘It’s true, it’s true.’

I say, ‘Adnan is doing well.’

Jones ponders. ‘He is in trouble in the Sahara. And the new museum like a berber tent is structurally unsound.’

I say wisely, ‘Those spring rains in Paris ...’ and, since Jones lets me think faster than he, ‘News from Qom?’

‘Slow. Very slow. But deep. Very deep.’

I am irritated. ‘Jones, you are talking like a statesman, but I’m not asking the right questions for that.’

‘You’re right, my dear – I may say – my deeply honest and authentic friend. You’re right. The mechanism has rather jammed.’ I imagine Jones dying and being fitted with rusty works by a witchdoctor in Recife. ‘The truth is,’ he says, ‘Drugs is peaked.’ An odd locution: Little Italy? Wall Street? Acton? ‘Finished, or finishing. A fucking dead loss waste of time. Like chickenpox. It has nothing ...’ – again the paralytic, wasteland pause – ‘… of the search, or the discovery.’

To hurry him up, I say, ‘I know. Between the payout and the feeling ill there’s just a buzz. So what?’

‘It is meaningless. Except, of course, for what it is. Lots of movement, to and fro on the surface of the earth. But what’s it for? No revelation. Just a medicine that doesn’t work, because life hurts.’

I say, ‘You’re becoming moralistic, Jones. What is looming on life’s horizon, in your view?’ On his desk there is a postcard with an Indian stamp. On it there is a printed black oblong, with an ‘x’ to mark a cell. I cannot read the name, but it is surely Madras jail. Jones sees me looking at the card, and smiles: ‘Ah yes, the good doctor. I have the ear of the Prime Minister, but there are many of us – mystics and gurus, we are called – who have the ear, but not the voice that commands, alas. So there will be no easy release.’

He is playing with a black spiral, a coil for spiking papers, it may be, or design for some resilient skeleton, taking on from us the baton for the next leg of evolution. The two images come together, and I say, ‘Black hands.’

‘Black palms, yes. A dreadful thing. And so you have heard, are well informed. Well yes, since you are, in nautical miles ...’ This time the sentence doesn’t end. He stares at me with two dead eyes. Which side is he on? Or is slavery just part of the market? I have sold myself for a part of Nadia’s salary, designated as a ‘secret policeman’: but that ‘secret’ cancels any easy notion of enslavement.

It occurs to me, as Jones stares me to the door, that I should buy large amounts of ammunition here and have it shipped back to the island.

I send a card I find with a black oblong on a black oblong, asking Jones if he can find space for crates on a freighter. He wrote to me: ‘Haha, yes. But Darya’s death displeased me a great deal. You must take care to prevent anything similar recurring, or no more crates.’ It is the old Jones, and I remember someone from the CIA saying, ‘We just caught the last commie bastards, and led their chief through the streets of New York in chains: let them eat apple pie. But how the fuck we’re going to deal with Jones?’

Later, Jones writes to say that Bhadhyopadhyay has been promoted prison doctor.

 

 

* * *

 

 

I return to memory island as to a big place. Thistle is right. It is immense, much larger and faster-growing than London. It is threatening, familiar. In the barracks, the police have baked me a cake, and we celebrate chastely and soberly. Nadia gives me no money, but promises more cakes. I celebrate in my own way with the brown brigands in the bar.

I am reading the journals of a doctor: in the 1950s, he writes of the first woundings he has seen.

 

His entrails hanging out like kilos of sausages he has stolen and tries with embarrassment to conceal ... a little girl of five, gravely hurt and disfigured in an accident. Looking out the window she had attracted a warning blast from a shotgun. All very grieved and aggrieved, at once promising vengeance and an end to it.

 

What had started them off? He writes from Mars, blaming it all ‘on transfer of loyalty to democracy, once the monarchy had failed to exercise its legitimate and softening authority’. But his brother too was involved in feuding, so he must have known more than he wrote.

 

It seems that in these times of troubles, when there is a battle between the old code, becoming savage, expansive, breaking down but infecting everyone – and the new, of self-control, loneliness and competition, bureaucratically policed, the transition is accomplished by what we call a criminal interlude.

 

This old doctor, not like Dr Bhad, now into poisoning on an industrial scale, leaves me quite sceptical.

Is memory island past or future, world slouching along or winding down? Do we want to change it, and by what? I interview Cecilia, who attacks me from the start.

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘It is impossible and insulting to start learning all the local languages. Quite inauthentic. As a journalist, you know we’re in the same trade – metalanguage. Not actually talking to people. Saying what they said, not what they meant but what we mean.’

‘Talking of trade,’ she says, ‘You seem to consume quintals of ammunition.’

‘It’s an American racial quirk,’ I say. ‘But, tell me, how are Bozo’s supplies and fortunes? You who play both sides and keep them fighting fit and fairly matched – is Bozo finding fuel for his beacons still?’

On the island, posters are appearing, with Bozo caricatured as a monstrous avenger: the wooden bull mask on his face, the smock, the staff, the shotgun – a figure straight from nature, and unmediated. If in nature there are shotguns. It reminds me of our raid in Paraguay, partly escape and partly Batman, a voyage into hell, and also wearing masks at times, I think, with Adnan always refusing his, which rather gave the ramp away. ‘A Lombard, an Arab, Indian and a reverend – four figures making a quartet no mask conceals. Cecilia stops being a journalist: ‘Bozo is despicable. A monster. An outlaw. Quite intolerable that he should claim a privileged relation with Thistle – or myself.’

‘I thought the four of you were legs to the same table?’

She glowers at me. We switch our tape recorders off. Each prepares in their particular way, to hear, deliver, the truth.

I suddenly see myself riding down the main street of Belo Horizonte in a detopped Charger (how did they call it, the slicing of the roof? the de-covering), with my friends. Not with Cecilia, neat hands used to yellow underline her university notes, saying ‘shit’ as she fumbles with the diskette, her left-liberal opinions, so useless in my world, the world that began in 1968, and ten years later quixotically bailing Adnan, and another ten years, using the deadeye on behalf of Jones in some rough and tumble. So useless in that world, and yet so effective in pinning me to my goddam desks with words that tomorrow will flash at me like dragon’s teeth in the New Islander. Stopping me practising with what even now may have docked, my Robinson-parcels, special author’s order – ‘heavy as lead’ the customs man said when the last lot came. Jeep’s springs squashed out like palm fronds.

‘So, Cecilia,’ I say, unenthused, ‘you and Bozo have split, Thistle is the new man we’ve been waiting for? A man of the transition? Sharing our moral uncertainties but talking them through? A touch of Byronism, some witty Wittgenstein, some insights from the good doctor Fanon?’

‘I’ve never met an anarchist policeman before,’ she says.

‘If that is supposed to be provocative, it isn’t,’ and indeed, in the dark warehouse of anarchy, lit by fairylights, it’s the norm. I go on, ‘You can leave me in peace’ – my throat hurts with screaming, and excitement at the thought of my freight – ‘unless you know who killed Darya. Don’t tell me it was the Black Hand gang, and don’t ask me why I want to know. I want to know. That’s simple enough, even a journalist can grasp that.’ Policewomen, alerted by my bellowing, are standing in the doorway.

Cecilia takes advantage of the presences to leave, but says, ‘I know. But I shan’t tell you until you’re in a reasonable mood.’ And what is more, the boxes haven’t come.

Someone sings about Rita Jeep, the ‘terribly little woman’, accompanying himself with a percussion instrument that sounds like a rattlesnake – that old rattler that caused us so much innocent fun, played near Jones’s bunk on the ship as he struggled up from his internal sea, dreaming of missals and monsters.

Nadia says, ‘I’m proud of you. At last you are talking like a policeman.’ Is she remarkably stupid – or perhaps she is herself losing the touch, the pitch of talk required in barracks? After all, we have no companies here: no one will work for industry, no one can be trusted in bureaucracies. The kids go to school and university but don’t want to work in them. It’s better to be unemployed, and I can live a long time on Nadia’s cakes.

Meanwhile, of course, people around are being killed, though so far we are safe. The crisis of values doesn’t affect us, since ours are written down, we carry summaries of them on our epaulets – and when we start to enjoy ourselves, they ship us back to the continent. Chiara telephones, and says, ‘How are the separatists?’

I say, ‘I have personally interrupted a big arms trade. A cargo ship has landed ammunition, much of it suitable for police weapons. I suspect an attack on us was planned: rob the armoury, take the guns – the ammunition already landed. Perfect.’ And I have the key to the warehouse where it’s stored.

She asks, ‘Was it for the separatists, the traditionalists, or the new politico-criminal triangle?’

‘Ah, well,’ I say, ‘I think we may say the struggle is between the fundamentalists in all three groups, and the modernists, the moderates, the Autonomist Popular Front.’

I marked the crates, FPA, for personal amusement, but in this little universe, very little cover is required.

‘Who should we be concerned about?’ she asks.

‘Well, I think everyone here is pretty dangerous. And we have all those tanks parked outside. A little hot-wiring job, and you’d find them all on sale in Asunción in a week.’ When the cakes run out. I go on, feeling like Cecilia: ‘The separatists you can always buy back. The traditionalists must be fully in our world. Your problem is wholly contingent.’

      ‘Well?’

‘It’s the nature of the alliances, and the business. If any of the groups wins out and corners the market in Touaregs, say, or lynchpins, then the moral fabric is compromised. Are you all reading Adam Smith?’

‘Yes, yes,’ she says. ‘But what about Bozo and Thistle – the big bosses you’ll have to leave to us. Everyone has started to play the micro-game, the little groups in little places. The Americans are losing Washington, the Russians have lost the periphery, GUM is in danger, so they tell us. Ethnicity is rampant everywhere, taking viral form.’

I tell her, ‘Chiara, this isn’t a little place. It’s Arabia Populata, an umbilical of the region. This place is the trig-determined keystone of the triangle: you may have read of it – the Goths, the Arabs and the people from the Cyclades, who made all the other civilisations.’

‘Oh my God,’ she says, and rings off.

If I am to be a third force, I must define another two: and if I am to have a free hand – but what to do? If I failed in Brazil to save the world, then surely here is not a place to act, but to retire to? Nadia is showing more interest in my past: ‘Then you knew Jones well, even before the boat?’

‘There is nothing in Jones to know well. He is a character, but he has none.’

She insists. ‘And the carpenter in Qom?’

‘He makes wooden medals for potential martyrs. I’ve seen one – “Call upon Ali, the manifestor of miracles, Thou shalt find him a help unto thee in adversities. All care and grief shall vanish, By the holiness” and so on. He’s made thousands. He got it off a coin.’

‘So, he’s not an artisan?’

I ponder. ‘Not when he’s producing these. They’re very successful, I believe, and so is he. But why ...?’

Nadia says, ‘I have inflated you for Chiara. I told her you are close to the big bosses.’

‘Why would you do that? I don’t care about big bosses anyway, only about big systems.’

Nadia is furious. ‘What are you then, some communist, and your big systems? It’s demeaning. Just push off.’

It’s true I have made little effort, as her administrative husband, but that is also for self-protection. To placate her, I say, ‘Nadia, you know neither I nor you matter, the police are just the good guys. I never suspected it.’

She is crying: ‘Well, I did.’

Perhaps I’ve been reticent about our repressive role – but I’m amazed that, with all our mornings taken up with faithfully pursuing it, Nadia should have got it wrong. I tell her, ‘My friends are all small fish – that’s how they slipped out of Paraguay,’ but I think they have all, except me, been socially promoted since.

She is still calling me a liar and a spy when we are all called to a homicide. There is much tension. ‘They didn’t come for him, they came for his cousin,’ say the neighbours. The youth is sitting on a kitchen chair. Most of his head was on the floor, but some was on his collar. We stand around while relatives are mute, or scream at us. I am tense too, and eat some of what is cooking in the pot. Nadia glowers at me. It is – was – very good. I interrogate an aunt, who bellows at me, and calls my powers in question. I say to the cops, ‘Taking all this shit to get a scrap of information,’ but they are used to it. We are told it’s Darya’s family who made a mistake: they wanted this guy’s cousin, but this lad got his all the same, because he’d recognised them.

I say to the chief, ‘Do you believe them?’ and she shrugs and says, ‘It could be another vendetta entirely, or perhaps he just saw something he wasn’t supposed to.’

Until I came to memory island, I had hoped to forget Jones. Perhaps I shall swing for him yet. I go outside, and an uncle tells me about being arrested, and how he always gets off by saying the name is wrong: ‘It’s wrong on everything,’ he chortles. ‘Birth certificate – even my parents got it wrong.’

I say primly, thinking of the victim, ‘That won’t protect you against mistaken identity,’ but he is repeating his story to the ambulance crew.

There is no crowd, only relatives: it is as if the funeral and the killing are simultaneous. Grief makes one hungry, and I go inside for some more lunch. It seems the kid was hit with staves – silently I add to myself ‘copper-shod’ – and not a gunshot. ‘Delivered with maniacal force – that of a human tank’ the doctor says, picking something off her gloves.

I ask about Darya, but the time is wrong. I wish I could go off to somewhere quiet and shoot at bottles. Robinson was crazy for the sound of the human voice – lucky Robinson. Falling back on solipsism.

‘Death is always such a human thing,’ says Nadia, as we drift away, bored with the show, its immobility: it moves her like a wedding. I want to ask her about salaries, but this occasion too is wrong. Thistle is leaning against a fig-tree. He reminds me of Robinson’s goatskins. ‘We are doing everything, just everything, to find whoever is responsible,’ he assures us.

I say to Nadia, ‘Everybody knows everything, except us. Ignorance means you’re not sure which of two people struck the first blow. Only we are ignorant: it’s as if we can’t, or don’t want to, tell one from another.’

She says, ‘Perhaps they want it that way. So they’re all innocent, or all guilty.’ And she is not telling me the truth, but I don’t know, can think, why. Another example of ‘I think I’m clever but they know I’m not’, the witchdoctor in his kraal waits for the British empire to crumble like a dog biscuit. We are in the land of paradox, where all the members of tribes A and B always lie (or always tell the truth), and we stand around in our braided hats, unable to distinguish people, or make sense of their answers.

I say to Nadia, ‘This will be a warning, not a resolution,’ and she replies gloomily, ‘It’s always a warning. How could death ever mark the end?’ and adds, unnecessarily, ‘I’m frightened. I’ve been sucked in,’ but I don’t take her seriously.

 

 

 

 

seven

 

 

Qom and Madras are difficult places for a dusty hopper to visit, paying with cruzeiros. So I shall go to Paris, guest of comrade-minister Adnan, sorting out affairs here so well it almost tempts me to stay. I catch the bus that takes me to the boat. It is early, but the auto-wreckers and the sheep already go tin-tin-tin-tin, the fairy lights in the cemetery have been extinguished. The donkeys are taking clean underwear to the brigands, their riders pretending to be somewhere else, my crates have been stacked away in caves: the night is over and the bars are opening for the marginal men. I catch the bus – and at the first corner, I am ordered off.

It’s the police, and I am always forgetting which side I’m on, whether I’m in tribe A or tribe B, and supposed always to lie, or tell the truth. They rush me to the barracks. They are fascinated by my being on the bus – like a bank robber escaping on a Shetland pony. When they see me becoming nervous as they tell me nothing – in my mind the question, ‘Why is something worth something rather than nothing?’ has formed and is coiled unanswered – they inform me that Nadia has been found dead.

I tell, but do not know, the truth. I say, ‘How strange. First Darya, who I scarcely knew, and now Nadia, who I scarcely knew, but on a much more conventional, intimate basis.’

The police felt my response inadequate: but young deaths were those I mainly knew, not the drawn-out and grieving ones of well-established, landmark people: young ones, dropped, disappeared, killing or being killed as they entered freeways up the wrong ramp. In jungles and on mountains, at the hands of guerrillas or invisible insects, at the orders of their governments, of international corporations, or just for fun.

Nadia had been broken up, it seemed as if to make a point, but they said she’d fallen, ‘or been jostled, or perhaps thrown’ off an escarpment. ‘Every bone in her body ...’ and I stressed ‘every bone’ to see if it was ritual, or spite, and they thought it was hysteria. I had to fight them off when, mentioning my ‘staves shod with copper’, I seem to have stimulated them to sedate me. ‘When that boy was beaten’ I began, and, ‘Shot’ the correction came, ‘Everyone could have their say, without a sedative in sight. Nadia would have been in barracks, not walking around. Besides, she’d been warned, felt frightened ...’

There is an air of embarrassment. The chief says, ‘I have still worse news,’ and tries to embrace me. ‘Nadia had a ‘friend’, one of the villagers, and had taken to sleeping out. Whilst you, as administrative husband, had no special status when it came to hours. And this all means, I fear, your back pay is in jeopardy. Though with my help, we may manage to get something for you – the documentation, you must understand, is terribly complex ...’

She sighs, and looks sharply at me. It seems a good time to resign and go to Paris. Procedures to get back pay sound impossible even before they start. Poor Nadia. I never knew what music you liked. Perhaps you were tone deaf. Perhaps you liked country, or Tex-Mex, and that would have been a barrier between us. And now there’s none. I can think of nothing to say. Usually in shock one does like everyone else, thus proving to an enlightened mind that the original, common state is one of trauma. But just now, it doesn’t work. My mind is buzzing like a power saw. I think of a cop who was killed in Yucatan, and they played ‘Old Devil Moon’ as he went down the hole, at twilight, too hot to bury in the afternoon, and the icewater sloshing out of the box. And I thought they'd never get me down to Old Devil Moon, but they arrested us all, the bereaved, the inquisitive and the guilty, all of us as we left the ceremony. But I got past that funeral too.

I wished I had the good doctor, or Tonino, with me. Either ready to attack in defence of a friend, with no regrets and no explanations. I remembered Thistle up his fig tree. There was no doubt the victim had been me. The design went from Darya via the ‘wrong man’ on to Nadia, and at that point it came into my domain – a word I now saw I knew the meaning of.

I am sucked in. I am part of a vendetta. Or part of a plot. Perhaps I have offended someone. Or seen someone going somewhere where they shouldn’t be seen. Or been sucked in by mistake. Transvers­al killing is a pot from which anyone at all can help themselves. And it has no interest – if at the end, Jones killed Darya and Chiara killed Nadia, with motives and backspinning as complex and as long as the infinite lengths of rope monkeys may hang themselves with in mechanics texts – I don’t feel involved. I can live with this. The complexity takes out any sting, or any offence I might have felt at Nadia’s death. Looking for a meaning in the deaths around gives you a cackling interest in your life, its pres­ervation and the threats to it.

Anyway, death has been waiting for me a long time, and – I tell Chiara when she lands from the continent – I’m still practising my aim. Shooting is going well here.

After my inburst, which was a rejection of my search for truth, I realise that I have little else left. It’s truth and nothing for you now, I say. And, with the insight that springs to idle and untrained minds, I am running to Thistle. He speaks his condolences without embarrassment – a bad sign, as if he knows what decompos­ition does to you. But I am uninterested in his statesmanlike phrases, his plea that his fellows should not be judged on the basis ... that independence gives the moral fibre needed to investigate the dark side of human actions, that if everyone had a job they would no longer hate and fear each other.

I am shouting now, and grasp him as I say, ‘You bag of roots. Why do you call yourself Bozo when you’re in the hills?’

He looks first furtive, then calm as a moonface. ‘I had nothing to do with Nadia.’

‘It’s irrelevant,’ I say. ‘Why do you call yourself Bozo when you’re up there?’

‘I didn’t commit Bozo’s crimes.’

I say, ‘It’s irrelevant. There may be an army of Bozos, and you be Cook Bozo, Armourer Bozo. I want to know – why?’

He wriggles away, melds with an olive grove, slips and turns in twigs and trunks. He is going, gone, and I only hear him say, ‘I think you know already ...’ and that at least is true.

 

 

* * *

 

 

I keep my discovery from Chiara. She says of Nadia, ‘A simple person – I didn’t know her well.’

It is an irritating remark, but I mention my desire not to be a policeman, but to be something else.

‘What would you be?’ she asks. ‘It’s a good place to observe the world from.’

‘The barracks?’

‘The search for truth.’

‘Aha,’ I say. ‘So you’re another one of us. But what will we do with it?’

She says, ‘Now I’m disappointed. If I knew, I wouldn’t be looking.’

I insist, ‘So it’s either – “he’s holy, but a fool”, or “he’s a fool, but holy”? At least you don’t suspect me of any recent crimes?’

She is decided: ‘No, if you were a murderer you’d have taken the early bus.’

So, that’s that. Only there is no early bus.

As we drive along, I point out to her we are in a de facto separatist island. Everything is. different here. Even the goats and sheep know that we’re alien, a little frightened, anti-separatist or sceptical. We are from the continent, and we strut around being cosmopolitan, while my friends in the bar laugh at us. If they are schizophrenic, we are comic.

I have been naive – and not only about Nadia, who was good to take me as a paper husband, after all. Of course Thistle must be Bozo too. It is something I forget, because somewhere I ran too fast, and left my other, my magic, terrible self behind. My Bozo is forlorn at the Paraguayan border, waiting for me to come back. It’ll be lucky.

And perhaps this is what policing really means – keeping the Bozos in the hills: yet usually it’s the cops themselves who’re Bozo, even building camps to use their sticks behind the walls.

I reject this utterly: Bozo is, but Bozo is also made, and named, and hunted, or released like Vesuvius. Chiara and I, two Pompeians grasping upwards from the mud, always too late, dragged down by the gold we flee with, two brown bronzes, like the little charioteer, frozen without his chariot, without reins, but boldly and forever in his attitude.

‘All right, I’m all right now, Chiara. The hunt can begin again.’

‘Aren’t you disturbed about Nadia’s lover?’ she asks.

‘Hoppers are curious, they don’t disturb. They mostly hop.’

Sex is for people who believe in it.

Chiara talks for a while about new relationships developing, new dimensions: I say, ‘I’ll come back when you’ve worked it out.’

She says, laughing, It may be too late then.’

‘I should expect so.’

      She is so insistent about Nadia’s lover that it is days before I realise it is herself she is talking about. But then, what? In the end I think, ‘she must want to be herself the object of jealousy’ – a modest ambition, but also a cautious one, being the object of suspicions, but never actually performing.

‘Chiara,’ I say, ‘life is a hunt and a vendetta. And of course I want to find who killed Nadia and so who wants to hurt me before killing me, and then of course I want to kill that person so that their family in turn can have the motivation to kill me. And if we go on long enough we will move from sheep to higher motivations, bigger stakes, to drugs and tanks and arms and hands. All this I will play along with, play with all my force. But I won’t pretend I’m jealous of Nadia’s Bozo. From Nadia all I wanted was back pay.’

Chiara smiles at me. There’s no unfixing her fixation. Like her smile, it’s fixed. She wants a challenge to unarmed combat, so she can show her skills. All right then. Bop! ‘Chiara, I’m leaving now for Paris. Must check up on a big boss, or even two.’

Walking off the stage is the classic way to end a scene, and Chiara sees I’ve won.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Adnan is apologetic about Paris. ‘Don’t go on about tristesse and the rain. And Berber tents, like any other structure, leak. If you have a fixation about the waterproof, go to a naval dockyard or a gumboot factory. It is not yet a city here. It is still the desert.’

‘To me, this mint tea is all right,’ I say.

He is moody. His position is unassailable: the left are renegades, the right too demagogic. He has abolished monarchy, but not the principle of his own legitimacy.

‘Jones is coming,’ he says. ‘I hoped for Tonino too. Jones is upset about the spread of killing. Also, he thinks if you are in line, then he may be the next. Jones is an eagle when it comes to spotting leaps of quality. Tonino, however, belongs to a plot of my own, of much delicacy, but also satisfaction.’

He wants to make Paris a great Arab city. On lay and egalitarian principles, a city of controlled hospitality and extensive largesse. It is for that he sees my magic island as a force, a refuge that can serve to control, perhaps to channel, the movement of the Arabs as clandestine labour. ‘A freeport?’ I suggest.

He shudders. ‘No, no. That all brings up the unfortunate time when Arabs were themselves owners and dealers of their neighbours – a time I’m anxious to forget, condemned, of course, by the religious, and ourselves. But alas, our past, unmasked, is still our past.’ I think he is alluding to adventures in Paraguay, but no, he is on the world scale, and a special, if a token, friend of the President himself. ‘The city is essentially oasis,’ says Adnan, ‘A place where ideas flow like water, and water feeds the flowers, the peacocks,’ he watches Americans dressed in slogans choosing postcards, ‘Petty commodity production. And the women, ah ...’

‘Are women and milk camels.’

Adnan is irritable and bored: ‘The women can do what they want, and the men, and the camels. What counts is the vision, not the milking. You Americans are all the same: milk, milk, milk. Everyone in sight.’

It is a relief to see Jones sidling into the brasserie, checking for secret service men in the toilets, refusing to take off his brown hat, now leaden with rain.

‘It’s making my neck ache,’ he tells Adnan. ‘Coming here always makes me think of guillotines.’ I suggest, ‘And boredom?’ He is as touchy as Adnan: ‘You cops can’t take care of your own, and the loss of Darya, at a personal level ...’

‘You knew her?’

‘Through Thistle, who protects us all from Bozo, and from contraband.’

‘It sounds like a child’s prayer,’ I say. ‘Which did not serve for Nadia.’

He and Adnan are soon stirring their common pot, but Jones annoys Adnan by referring to the President as ‘his master’. In the end we go to the cinema together, but quarrel over the choice of film, and end up in three separate auditoriums, each alone and trying to puzzle out the others’ mystery. Adnan’s bodyguards have gone to yet another film, and we hang about for them in the rain till their show has finished. ‘Anyone could take a shot at us,’ Jones complains, and insists on holding up a crucifix as proof of our harmlessness. It repays Adnan for his silliness in Paraguay, but it also shows that Jones’s power and fame inflate his paranoia like a bladder.

Jones and Adnan compare notes on how each does his job: Adnan says, ‘I get my staff to write up my thoughts. This Arab city project, for example. It sounds startling, even raw. My people take my vision and, so to speak, frame it.’

Jones nods sagely, and says, ‘I have two rules. Never greet a visitor at your desk, and never close the door during a meeting. It frustrates eaves-droppers.’ The two great men gaze at other with respect and envy. I thought with nostalgia of Brazil, where great men and women were really massive, memorable: gods, if not God, regularly present. Ministers who had ordered executions, women who introduced themselves as angels and turned out not to be.

I mentioned Tonino, the carpenter. Jones was alarmed: ‘Never call him the carpenter outside our circle. He’s the only one of us who can handle money directly. Calling him carpenter is like calling him a fixer, or one of those pejorative Italian words. He is the One who makes things Possible.’

‘He’s a giant,’ says Adnan, ‘and not only in the physical sense. He rides the revolution like riding a bronco. All two metres of him. What a sight. Perhaps he sports a turban now. And always with that deeply lay sensibility, the search for a formula that with a few repetitions will outlaw drugs, and give my people back their purity. The purity of the desert. Of faith.’

I thought, ‘And this is to be realised in Paris?’ but kept quiet. The journey of a thousand miles not only starts with a single step, it starts from a place you have decided to leave, and far behind. Paris might be such a starting point.

‘And Doctor Bhad, poor devil,’ says Jones.

‘Yes, but at least he is a devil,’ Adnan replies. ‘And so he knows his way around. And, for someone on death row, he’s doing very well.’

Jones insists there was no death penalty in Madras, and Adnan insists it was a legacy of the Raj. I grow bored and wander away. I hear Jones saying, ‘I thought Nadia’s death would wake him up a bit. They’ve got an army on the island, but the girls who run it are as vague as he is.’ And Adnan says, ‘He only thinks about the details, petty sleuthing, not the grand design. But there’s no one else to handle Bozo.’

We have more mint tea and discuss the future of the world. Jones says, ‘A twinkling of an eye after creation, God was trying to save it from dropping in the shit,’ and Adnan says, in mock reproof, ‘I thought you gave the old man a hand, not criticised the plan,’ and Jones rocks with laughter: ‘I invented the business, I invented the business.’ And indeed, he would be my candidate for that honour.

As great men will, they congratulate each other: ‘Jones is a great man,’ ‘Adnan is the greatest,’ and of me they say, ‘And Hopper is a simple soul,’ but with great affection. Jones questions Adnan sharply about his true powers, and Adnan wryly admits, ‘Here, we’re mostly ministers of culture,’ and in return suggests Jones may not be too secure in London. Jones says, ‘Knowing everything and saying nothing. That’s the secret in the power industry.’

It seems a good time to begin leaving, but they tell me, ‘You play a crucial role. The more they kill, the closer they come to you – the more important they think you are, the better you’re doing. And separatism – not the real thing, of course, for who would help you then? – is the best card to play just now.’

‘Do I play it face up or down?’ I ask, and they think that’s a fine joke.

 

 

 

 

eight

 

 

Alone with Jones, I say: ‘How many deaths, Jones? How close to me? And what for? And, by the way, where is your extravagance, your radical critique of everything that lurks and plots, your endless challenge to those dark powers that showed your God at his most inventive and intricate? On the island, which is not yet named, and by you and Adnan never can be, unpleasant things are going on, are rooted in. I shall not speak of evil, but of habits, of a way of self-reproduction – it seems that some archaic consciousness – first, of course, I think of yours – is there profoundly at its work.’

‘Power coopts fantasy, my dear old friend. You surely realise that now – although, of course, I personally am the weakest of the weak – I can struggle openly for many things. The first, of course, against the importation of ginseng. We have a lobby going. To you, it may seem trivial. But it’s a start. And then, Tonino is our champion. Money, you remember, is attracted to him, he’s a tall electromagnet, taller even than you, dear friend. You set him down – the valuables flow towards him. I see him matched with Bozo, a kind of Sherlock locked with Moriarty. Tumbling, alas, the two of them, down the escarpment by the cemetery, perhaps.’

I have told no one that Bozo is an army, that Thistle is the malombra of the Bozos. To do so would seem impossibly pessimistic, might even seem that I am anti-separatist, or that I have doubts about my colleagues in their fight for feminism’s third way, and the exorcism of the Bozo that, alas, seems deeply rooted in all us walking islands. I say to Jones, ‘Hoping that Tonino will leave us his magic couplet and the bank books....’ But Jones nods seriously: ‘The bank books we can pick up afterwards – the couplet is essential. He should pursue his numismatic studies, even though it seems that woodworking on an industrial scale is doing very well ... And, of course, presents no threat to Adnan.’ He draws me close, and looks to where Adnan is playing tric-trac with his bodyguards, and I smell the authentic rasp of Jones’s obsessive diet, of persimmons and salt cod, the latter rich in Portuguese connections: ‘The Arabs have no trees, you see! Desert. No trees. Capisc’, old friend? Tonino is cut out by nature’, and he laughs so loud that Adnan is attracted by the crackling noise.

Brazil turned out to be a desert, and now I see it creeping up towards me here. A little tenderness? Some peace? How they would laugh at me in Berkeley now, and shades of the dear Bishop, an authentic one this time, I think, and not like Jones, who could promote himself without anyone being the wiser.

I think of Nadia, in whom common sense cut out tenderness and peace – at least with me – in exchange for being sensible and energetic. What did she do, off in the fields, with her local Bozo, thinking she wouldn’t burn her fingers, wriggling her long legs until one night in the moonlight, Bozo masked and terrible, the stave, the leather bag, the ritual despatch ...

Life, entering and leaving on one’s back, or snail-like, wrapped round, as for Nadia; the foetal clubbing ... I snatch myself away. All there is on the island is death, and the great trick there is never having it occur by accident. This is the discovery. You do not need to wait. You can build a whole culture about making it happen. A great discovery, that, patented and exported to the world: a competition for who’s made the best invention.

‘Why so gloomy, my good Hopper?’ It is Adnan, and he’s won his game. ‘You, gentlemen, must be my guests this evening, at the opera. I’m going as a gesture against our fascists here: it’s The Italian Girl in Algiers. A little hard to swallow, I admit. But for Jones, I think there are no special problems of sensibility or doctrine, for Hopper we can find some kind of uniform. I’ll ring the museums right away.’

And so, each wondering what he is supposed to be, we take our places on the other side, the side away from the stage. I am a green halberdier. For Jones, the orchestra plays the Paraguayan anthem, but he doesn’t recognise it. We are deep in theatreland, where anything’s supposed to happen, but Adnan is nervous, thinking of Lincoln, and perhaps hoping for the chrism of assassination: ‘For after all, we invented the notion,’ he whispers to me. I suspect I see his bodyguards being jostled about in the chorus, but the scenes bustle along like a sequence of publicity spots, and no one’s enthusiasm gets out of hand. I am relieved now when a gathering does not end in murder and we cops all standing round with white gloves on. I don’t think there were deaths even on the stage, but at the end Adnan quietly wished them all to hell, so it was all the same.

In my room, there is a call from Cecilia. ‘The minister, I think, is not indifferent to the island,’ and she waits.

I wait too, and she says, ‘But in a freeport it would hardly do to import arms.’

‘Nor to pitch one’s tent,’ I say, but she does not follow up the allusion. She goes on, ‘The deaths are an embarrassment for him.’

I say, ‘Adnan does not seem an embarrassed man.’

‘I mean in the diplomatic, not the literal sense. And Jones – he seems to us to be your master – he’s a good guy too, when it comes to keeping you alive.’

‘This dog has no master,’ I tell her, but she grips me with her claw: ‘Two of the deaths don’t interest me. And yours would confirm my thesis.’

‘That sounds like a threat,’ and I thought of other crimes she might be committing. ‘Knowledge is a great offence,’ I say. ‘It is the string on which all these events are strung.’ I am dismayed by my thought. My project is the search for truth, and yet I’ve said that knowing it is what makes one supremely guilty. I correct myself, ‘Knowledge, I mean of course, in the criminal and not the literal sense.’ And my search for truth – is it just a search for others to incriminate? Or so I think – it’s only ever others. Well, of course, it only ever is, the others, or the Other, who is guilty. Jones will tell you that. Cecilia is outside the game. Only Chiara is stern enough, and with handcuffs enough to give us all a manacling, even to include herself. Perhaps, then, our embrace in the grave a kind of pact, or of complicity.

I remember Jones in Paraguay, telling me, ‘My friend, this poking and prying will end up badly for you. You see what they want to do to you. First you must stop them – and if there’s some time left, you may ask them why they’ve tried to do you down. But first you must win.’

I tell Cecilia at dictation speed – before the rhythm of the modern worlds let you write things down before they had been thought: ‘Tell Thistle that we’re on to him. A massive artisan is on his way, will come to seek him out, coming from lands of blood and justice, assertion of parity, superiority on a scale your Bozos could not dream of. Thistle will surely win, and just as sure, will be cast down.’

And I think, and if not Tonino, then Adnan will surely contrive to spring our Dr Bhad, and he, with syringe or potion, will manage Thistle in the space it takes – a mere contraction of the throat. I think – the mint tea, Nadia’s cakes, the kitchen with the stew of brain – I’ve been incautious. I’ve been sucked in, made myself vulnerable, even as I have been sucking down these brews, infusions. The kinds of food they left in pots of ashes, or sarcophagus. The eggs, the olives? I remember, yes, Thistle and I ... Almost every time we meet, he has a trio of olives, brace of eggs to share, a meal to last a hundred years in limbo, but just gobbled down, here, on the island that still lacks a name. The naming becomes important: give it a name so it can die.

Adnan cannot see us off: he is speaking on the Pacific: ‘the nation – from desert to ocean’. Lots of other Adnans from many countries will be there, coming to terms with their new histories and citizenship. ‘Why do you bother?’ I ask. ‘Keeping on with this dead peasant civilisation you despise when you meet it, and those little farts of generals that got you into messes a hundred years ago, when savages really were savages, and you had culverins to set the bastards running ...’

Adnan looks paternal. ‘A view only an American could have, and an unreconstructed one. History is big money now, spaghetti for the mind. The bits you don’t like, you can leave – it does no harm to anyone. No one starves for want of history.’ Jones is ready to argue this, and I see his mouth full of wriggling things like ‘identity’ and ‘Protestantism’. But instead he says, ‘I have plans to start a new world religion.’ I hear Adnan groan, and my own sadness intensifies. Jones has prepared what should have been an opening speech, and gives it as the planes start up to take us where we are living. Jones says:

‘A world-system needs a world religion, right? That fits the economic set-up, without being too insistent. And gives the girls new space – perhaps some kind of rotating godhead? Or even bi-sex. I’ve got my bishops working on that one. But mystery, I think, is out. Far too many of those about, and if they’re there, best not to pry. So, a lot of light and clarity, I think, and being equal, and first names, and all that. And of course a big investment bank, a world fund for charity, good works, and all that. But this time, with full government support: we have too many martyrs and not enough saints. Too many agnostics and not enough bishops. What Tertullian says ...’

The formalities press in on us, and Jones is poked with guns.

He is carrying metal rods inside his breadsticks, gifts for ministerial colleagues. ‘What the fuck are these?’ asks a corporal.

‘They are wands,’ says Jones with dignity. ‘They’ve been drilled out and rifled,’ says the soldier.

‘Exigencies of ritual,’ Jones huffs, bustling everything through.

‘Can’t you ever break this habit of running things through?’ I ask.

‘They’re just a few barrels, my dear friend. Swords into ploughshares, that’s the theme, and easily reversible if you grease them right.’ He is gone, but a smell of trouble lingers.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Back on the island, it seems we are much diminished. Chiara is in charge, the Bozos have multiplied, and Thistle has become a figure now much compromised. But our little run of deaths has acted like a fever, left us weak and grey. The yellow bushes have flowered. It leaves me indifferent. After they have disappeared, it will be the turn of the pink ones, then the white. Then it will be summer and there will be no way off the island, for all the places on boat and plane will be booked by tourists.

So, there is only Chiara left, while the figure of Tonino grows ever larger and more itchy, like the last, lost piece of the jigsaw that has occupied a convalescence.

Chiara is again my friend, and my superior. I have forgotten I am in the police. I feel that if I don’t take their money, I’m still free, but they don’t think like that, and ask for sums to cover overpayments, outings I’ve not been on, indemnities to cover memberships I’ve never taken out. I think of Jones’s idea of a bisex god, and think of the Byzantine hydraulic thrones, the empty seat for God – or was it for a wife, down in the charioteers’ dressing rooms? Perhaps I could suggest to Chiara that with all those tanks outside and rusting (‘no to housework, no to routine maintenance’), we might try a coup, and then a little local religion, a cult which Jones might favour. A little orgiastic, but disinfected well: – to keep the tourist industry going. And then, perhaps in caves, the real thing. Adulation of myself, maybe. I say aloud to Chiara, who is lapping up her power and smelling like a jasmine tree, ‘There is a planetary predisposition to worship leaders. Something wholesome but uninhibited might be a brightener here ...’

But she is beaming, and I see a folder on her desk, with purple stamps like disinfectant, a sun that looks Iranian, but can only be … fuck. Paraguay.

‘Yes, at last your folder has come through. And I confess,’ she smiles, looks sad, she frowns. ‘It’s a puzzle. My first reaction was to forget about it ...’

‘What can I say?’ And which version is it? The one we paid to have put in the archive, or the one they wrote out first, before we flattered them with cash. Or both, double indemnity.

She holds it closed, as if it is a loaded popup book.

‘Give me a clue,’ I say. ‘How many murders in cold blood, how many hours of torture?’

‘A remarkable number of victims, mostly and fortunately, aged, and an even more remarkable rate of fire. It seems they recognised your Arab friend.’

‘There’s nothing wrong in having Arab friends. It’s he, not me who was imprudent.’

‘But why?’

‘We needed money to get out. They had impounded ours.’

      She smiles again. ‘But a bank so central? And they say the money was Brazilian, hot.’

‘Naturally, all money there is hot. It’s a geological peculiarity. And we thought a metropolitan bank would carry currency that was more easily convertible. And besides, we were very young. A student prank. And those that died in that report, were dead already. Anyone missing was put down, and all who died that week. They went round taking names in funeral parlours. It was a great coup for police records.’

‘But the central fact? You don’t contest?’

‘But naturally,’ I say. My lower body is leaving greasemarks on the chair. It’s like a truth machine. I wriggle up and down and Chiara laughs delightedly.

‘You’re actually wriggling! I’ve never seen anyone do that. We bring people here who’re charged with horrible crimes, all in the family too – but they can all sit still.’

‘If I were you,’ I say, ‘I’d forget about it all. It was long ago, and besides, look at the yellow bushes all in flower. And what is guilt, what is the past? You should look more closely at your Proust, the modernist personality unable to get out of bed, and yet at some time in the past, having made acquaintance of all sorts of people, even some louche, though I must say my memory deserts me there … Which in a way is proof of what I say. One’s memory alone can speak of guilt, and memory is so plastic ...’

She asks, ‘You are accusing Proust of robbing banks?’

‘I should not have taken him along. I could be wrong: to me, he’d be a liability. And hence his art is limited.’

‘You couldn’t trust him on a heist? But then, the strange thing is this rate of fire.’

I tell her, ‘A good qualification in a cop, I’d say. If you shoot intensely no one gets hurt and no one sees you. And so, in a way, justice is done. The truth is served.’

Fuck, I think. I’m cooked.

She says, ‘Policemen should not rob banks.’

‘You’re being very prim. Think what policeman here and there have done, all paid up, even going for promotion, doing their intelligence tests in locker-rooms ...’ I talk for a long time of experiences with the police: of things I have read, and things scarcely worse that I have imagined.

‘But that is exactly why we ought to throw you out.’

‘But my protest was political.’ Her face falls. And indeed, Jones had bishops to pay off, Adnan wanted to make it into politics, and so he had this obsession about uncovering his face: Tonino was always thick with politicians and Dr Bhad was always useful, always a spare wheel, trundling along, somewhere behind and in the dark, but eminently reliable.

Chiara has given up. Political crimes involve treks through pathless histories and motivations so ambiguous ...

I see my escape. ‘It is in any case all covered by an amnesty. One there, one here. These accusations simply don’t exist, they’re liquidated.

‘But the deaths. Alleged,’ she asks.

‘Paid off at the recognised rate, but with no admission of guilt. They had the best funerals in Asunción that week.’

‘But here it says that you weren’t caught.’

‘That’s right. Just the usual frontier check.’

I begin to relax. Perhaps more crates have come.

And she is right. That’s why they remembered us. It was a magnificent rate of fire. That day I had them hopping. Not to do them harm, but like a kind of horizontal fireworks. It gave me a great peace, like Robinson calling up the storm, or opening the taps in the hold and so starting his adventure.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She has me, but doesn’t know which end to start skinning first. I wriggle some more. ‘Perhaps if it’s political, I could get someone to cover for me. For Jones and Adnan, it’s easy – prime minister and president, and Tonino could find someone. The good doctor in Madras can vouch for himself. And I – I could find some old communist somewhere, a senator perhaps, there must be someone left ...’ She is calculating: ‘The problem is, we should not have taken you on with this outstanding.’ She pokes at the document, purple and red like a used bandage. ‘You should have told us.’

I lose patience. ‘You’re mad! Who would ever say some cop has you on his files? That’s for you to find out.’

‘Don’t shout. The others are resting.’

‘So should I be. And counting my back pay.’

She draws a line under her big sum. It is very long, I haven’t seen one that long since I started school, and learnt to spell my first word – ‘mucilage’. At home they thought I was a genius. My rubber, extracted from some plant well known to Dr Bhad, had nearly taken me to Harvard at the age of six. But then they found out what the fees were.

‘There is a way out,’ says Chiara. ‘They taught me this in the advanced school. We cancel all your past with us. And re-enrol you as from now, all neatly pardoned, amnestied, whatever. A black sheep who has lost his spots. And the secret will remain between us – like a bad dream,’ and she smiles sweetly. I think, I feel no pain, but something has been amputated: it cannot be my history. All that was lost in the shipwreck. It cannot be my Friday, for I am Friday, slow to learn and not much fun to talk to. Always up the beach looking for other blacks – perhaps those from the tribe that always tells the truth?

I ask, ‘My back pay?’

‘All that is history. And it will just stretch, with careful management, to cover the laying of that volleyball complex the girls are always asking for.’ She makes airy motions, and I think she is moving my money from one budget to another, or she may be miming ball games.

When Friday asked for pay, for brightening up young Robinson’s goatskins, his master paid him off in psalms. At least you could take them and scream them out off some rock – but with a volleyball court, I was stuck here in my profession. ‘It seems hard,’ I say, ‘That Nadia should have kept me as her paper husband, and all for nothing.’

Chiara says dismissively, ‘You could take her flowers. Or,’ and she giggles, ‘fire a few thousand volleys over her grave.’

‘I won’t deny you your pleasure,’ I say, ‘but at least remember, if you cancel out my history, you also cancel all my knowledge, and even jeopardise my commitment to the truth.’

Chiara says, ‘But think of the pleasure your volleyball will give.’

I am nostalgic for Brazil, for when the world ends there, they will go down drumming and whooping, and jiggling and insinuating. But here it will come late, by post, when we have tried to make a business on it, lost our money, joined the Devil’s party in the hope that somehow, along with everything else, the ending of the world may be postponed, to do a favour.

I go to the bar, and discuss the best ways of butchering sheep, and what to do when tails drop off – and I know that’s information that is the truth, and that it helps my job. And someone says, ‘If we knew who killed her, we would want you to kill them. Otherwise we wouldn’t tell.’

‘I’m not falling for that one.’ But of course they know. Before I left Chiara, still delighted with the trick she has pulled off – thanks to, and in its harmless way more slimy than, the Paraguayan cops – I said: ‘I give you three scenarios. Headquarters of a world religion-cum-investment bank. A refuge for the survivors of the desert. Or a battleground where our local devils can fight it out with two international champions, personally known to me as world-class villains. It will make the one-by-one killings look a little thin. Which will you prefer, Colonel Chiara, sir?’

And she still smiled, and said, ‘You haven’t understood. It doesn’t matter to me at all. The police don’t really care. And if you go on looking for the truth, you’ll find it too – just like the cops – is quite indifferent to you, and everybody else, to everything that is or has been in the world. What marks us, like the truth, is our absolute, our through and through, uncaring. We just don’t give a shit. We and the truth.’

And I begin to regret shouting so loud about that’s what I was looking for, and was it on the left hand or the right hand of the general, and hydraulic thrones and all of that – and it seemed to me there was a Byzantine aspirant to one or other of those thrones who had a wrestling past, lifting the bronze throne-room doors right off their hinges. And here there are no bronze doors, just, in memoriam, the thump and bustle, bouncing dialectics, of Chiara’s volleyball. And perhaps I should be better as a wrestling emperor in Byzantium.

 

 

 

nine

 

 

I say to Chiara, ‘I feel I must explore the island.’

She says, ‘It’s been explored.’

‘That didn’t deter our Robinson,’ I say. Besides, I’m tired of standing like king stork, waiting to be poached or netted. Survey the ground, perhaps a bout with Bozo. Or take a tank?

Too bumpy, and too dark, and not quite Robinson. And yet, what did Robinson amount to? One subject and the urge to leave. And I, instead, forever start Day One of my police regime and plan True Communism. Perhaps it will come, if we don’t tell anyone ... But in that case, where is the fun, the point – and is it really True?

Cecilia is there to see me off: ‘You travel kind of heavy, don’t you think?’

‘Memorial stones and aide-memoires, and marking-sticks and canvases for panoramic scenes and modelling clay and things for plaster casts. It’s just policeman’s crap,’ I tell her.

‘It’s more what you would take if you were to stake a claim and found a nation.’

‘Ah. I’ve never done that.’

She asks, ‘Is this a challenge against Thistle? Or perhaps to Bozo? You will find the island already belongs to lots of people – and besides, your mafia links are getting quite outrageous.’

I blow out my cheeks like a gourd, in a way I hope is childish and irritating.

She smiles sadly. ‘Poor sad Robinson Friday. You’re mad to go exploring in the old world. They’ll skin you. Or beat you ...’ With staves shod in copper.

My friends are anxious to be off. They are carrying omelettes stiffened out with flour, that look like goatskin hats. I think of the landscape of the Po, that’s like a dead sea cemented over, where you can hear a gurgling, like a drowning, water going nowhere, fermenting, stewing in itself. Yes, there you will find nothing but yourself, a questioning drowned face peering from no mirror, wrinkled into no wave – a face, a faintly brewery smell, a nothing much with eels and postcard views: frost, big houses made of marzipan. And here – I think of Thistle’s journal, and his peering through the molten glass, too thick for sounds to penetrate.

We lope along like stags. Thistle, lying down, could see the moving pools of sheep as clouds, exchanging green for blue, just as the sea without a thought can do; sheep on the uplands. And below – nothing. More air like glass. Holding him up. Or – where is up? Robinson has a good idea, that’s based on heaven, looking up ... Sorting out the images I walk on air, and fall so far I’ve time to think I’m going to die. I see the sky as Bruckner said he saw it, then the edge is filled with faces, blurry like fingers on a jug’s rim. I think, ‘If I were the milk that’s nearly spilled’, and laugh at the labyrinth of ups and downs that’s brought me here, thinking a moment – of myself as the monster coming up or going down to hell, and laughing.

We sort ourselves into another more cautious band of stags. We are brown and grey, and we look like bandits, and as I cut our way through fences (‘The One World Spa’, ‘Dead Sea Cottages’), we might have been coming to dictate our constitution to the planet. Another constitution …

The king upside down, who dreams of water and falls on air. And Robinson went home to avoid being subject to his Friday, who became king because he knew an English psalm. Now I’m the biggest Friday of them all – and yet it seems to me the bandit king is really a woman ...

My friends are laughing at me, not knowing which way up and down are, and already being shaken up and rubbery, just like a bag of bones. ‘He’s fallen down the monster’s chimney,’ they laugh.

Thistle is right, the vastness of these plains above the mountains – abandoned habitations of sheep, the troughs they left, some full of scalding yellow water.

Here you cannot see, would never dream of inventing, the sea. The danger comes from elsewhere: from below, above, the man next to you, not playing at being an animal but wearing its mask, ice weapons. But frightening? More a stretching, as if you were elastic, distorting: tense, naturally. An animal that fights his brother to the death: but also may not, or not always. Or perhaps kills no more easily than people at the One World Spa, the Dead Sea Cottages. No, not frightened, for they are leading me, and not up to the woods for execution, with the gun and witnesses, but evidently to a something, something that interests them too, that they’ve not seen, perhaps, for quite a while. Something they know about, but – it still frightens them.

The pines are thicker here, following the water where we only see cleft rocks, the marks of cloven hooves. Not a devil’s mark, but sheep’s foot, or a swallow folded. A single letter, first, last and only, in this Babylonian clay, this copybook.

We find what they are looking for. A stone hut, all underground and dry, like a South Seas council chamber, made by the Originals here; who have only left their voices, no one bothering to write down what everyone knows they’re saying. Around the walls, squatting as the men do who keep the sheep, a whole parliament of wooden replicas. There is Darya, her painted face is pasty, but of course down here, until we came, there is no light. And there’s the boy that I found in the kitchen, a face I didn’t recognise, but it is he, because beyond him and Darya there is Nadia, in her uniform. Only, the faces are painted, and the hair is not a likeness, but a mass of roots, and the hands and feet stick out in wood. The recent dead have flesh that’s like the fat in butcher’s shops.

‘Like Bluebeard’s Castle,’ I say.

Someone comments proudly, ‘You see, they are all here, no one is forgotten. Even the most recent. Even the mistakes are here, everyone has the honour that they should.’

I think, ‘Everyone has the same honour, or the same treatment’, and aloud I say, ‘Who did – who does all this?’

There is silence for a long time, as they gather round and wait for me to answer my own question. It’s obvious that if you want to be king, you have to know the answers, everyone else can look for truth, but you must know. Only, I don’t want to be a king, or not the kind that knows, I’d rather be the one that makes decisions.

‘You’re supposed to find out who does things,’ says someone, not so friendly.

‘It’s like a gathering, a waiting. And yet it’s also ritual, and open – so, not sacrifices, but a cause. And yet – there’s no one here but victims, nothing more, no symbols, and no furniture.’

      A friend, Corrado, asks, ‘Who makes statues of the dead?’

I say: ‘Most peoples, but not you. The dead here are too fiercely contested. They are owned. Here, I’ve never seen a statue. And yet, these are not zombies, nor are they ancestors.’

‘They won’t run away either,’ says Corrado.

Of course. We have come to see our prisoners, the ones that do not bleat, or need much food. And what am I? An intermediary? Checking on their condition? Yes, they’re still dead, and all lined up here – I think they go back thirty years – there must be fifty, or a hundred, even, this shady long hut has reconciled the families, but it’s not a tomb. A prison, for the kidnapped. Waiting for their ransom. And then what?

And they’re carved so well, by people who will have known them in their life, or copied them from records even we can’t find ... and so, with journals and with notebooks, carving for those who want a better thing than merely writing and yet is not dull, not like Cecilia’s tapes.

So, we unpack our gear: Giusy who’s the painter starts to paint, the others start to make casts and take measurements. For I have promised Chiara I’ll bring back a show of evidence done in the real, the nineteenth-century style. ‘My mode is realism,’ I have told her, although the boys at Berkeley would not credit it. And I wonder what to do with Nadia, for it isn’t really her, and in the end I brush her uniform down.

 

 

* * *

 

 

We work in silence to make a lifesize copy of these images. We treat them solemnly, with awe, as if they were real corpses. They are made more human than I had last seen them, Darya, Nadia, the boy in the kitchen who was then without his face, and now has even two arched intelligent eyebrows. I think of my de-topped Dodge. We have finished. We can take to the payers of the ransom the proof that all are really dead. We have made a cast, a plaster igloo. The bearers eat their omelettes and pick up the burdens. I have Polaroided everything, and instant realism comes into its own. The figures squat, waiting for that first blow again.

The sea, we see the sea. It is horrible. We all turn away. It is green, just like they say, an emerald green with spikes of light. It turns us back, ring of fire.

We stagger on. I think we stumble into Bozo’s hideaway, drink at Thistle’s fountain. We even disturb some other bandit who fires at us, a burst so close I hear it whirring past. But we’re so hot and tired that we’re invincible. I brush and smack the bullets as they pass, and someone shouts, ‘Go back to sleep’, and I see a pair of fat brown trousers, like a pair of game bags, skittering up the hill, a gun barrel wagging like a tail.

We are celebrities, when we get back, and put our plaster cast and canvases on show. I walk around in front of the dummies, and peer at the audience’s expressions. I feel like one of Adnan’s masters of the theatre. I worry that we were too busy with our object to notice if we really did find emplacements and redoubts, fortresses for Bozo’s army. But it is clear that I have made my challenge, both to Bozo and to Thistle.

Chiara is furious: ‘You cut your way through everything. The wire, all those hotels, the swimming pools you washed your feet in, the sheep roasted: electricity pylons dynamited. Burning, looting and exploding. Coming under fire when unarmed. And we have lost a million rounds, and somehow all the records in the files have lost their photographs, and you instead have Polaroided all the dead of centuries, all sitting round and socialising, even with Nadia in the uniform she was  buried in.’

I say, ‘I had to dynamite to plant my marking-sticks. But you will see – after today, everyone will think you are a third force, determined and strong.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘Everyone thinks you are a new force for independ­ence, avenging everyone’s dead. Destroying the tourist industry single handed. Proof against silver bullets. And to think we must protect you!’

‘It’s true, I am proof against silver bullets, and I have a paper to guarantee it from Ipameri. It’s a lifetime guarantee. Now, if you permit, I shall go to my tent. I believe other human beings have lived here. They have eaten each other, or been magicked into sheep. I have no political ambitions, I’m just a simple farm boy.’

Outside, people point at me, but don’t get near. It reminds me of Paraguay.

The sheep are silent, but their bells go tin-tin-tin-tin. And I am silent and I think of listening to Dylan and crossing state lines over and over. And I’m sinking in this porridge, of kings and revolutions and police and sheep and holding closed your stomach so the guts don’t spill. Chiara summons me: her moods are always complex, oniony, as if living with them makes her cry – but ‘vegetable tears’, as Dr Bhad would say. And I wonder when Tonino will arrive, and start to think of ways to do him down, for he would never sing along, no simple farm boy he. And yet I wondered, if he’d not perhaps whittled Nadia’s face, given back its look of discontent that screwing with the Bozo had removed ...

Chiara is happy again. ‘Think, think, think,’ she says, ‘Like an old sheep. Or should I say a ram.’

I am moving towards a centre. Why do I feel things are falling apart? Chiara says, ‘You’re a celebrity, but you don’t have charisma. What you need is staff. A go-between. A person like Cecilia would be fine. I know about these things – I covered for you over Paraguay. I know you hate to share, but I assure you, everyone dislikes this business of the cover, protection, the palace friend. You need a political guardian.’

‘Oh no, not more of that.’

She continues, ‘You can’t come in and break the rules without someone to justify you upstairs ...’

I say, ‘You need to know the rules to break them.’

‘Exploding? Commanding bands of realist painters?’

I tell a little of the truth: ‘I don’t want to be here.’

She smiles. ‘Not spoken like a real Robinson. You are prickly. Its the job. But I’m waiting for that gesture from you. That tenderness you couldn’t show to Nadia, and that drove her out of here, out of the barracks, out of our world, and yours.’

Where is she steering her big machine now, with me in its path? She sees herself as drunken driver and as ambulance: ‘knock them down and pick them up’. Ah, Dylan had a simpler, purer vision, and now swept out of orbit, up among the stars, still travelling fast and light.

‘There is also a law against private armies,’ says Chiara.

‘Not if they’re in suits in offices,’ I say, but I’m thinking of protection in two crates, with perhaps another two, like robbers’ jars, for holding Tonino and the Doctor. ‘Go on, Chiara,’ I say. ‘The lock can take another twist.’

‘It seems your friends have fallen out. Adnan and Jones, competing for peripheral peoples, have almost come to blows.’

I tell her, ‘Adnan would win. He’s done so every time, and Jones blames oriental methods, but the truth is, Jones bleeds easily.’

‘And, of course, they’re suited now,’ says Chiara, but she means that wearing suits makes ministers look more transgressive as they kick each other down the stairs.

‘And how am I affected?’ I ask.

‘Jones wants to make the island a fortress against drugs, calling on tradition to defend us. Adnan wants to bring all his Arabs in, to protect them from the monopolists of labour.’

‘My friends in the bar won’t feel closely involved in the principles, though the details may be irksome,’ I say.

‘Don’t be condescending. And they’ll have to take the long view. Irksome! We’re not proposing that they work in factories, or give up their sheep.’ She becomes conciliatory. ‘I know it’s hard for you to work for us and live without money. But your friends are mafia. Must I cover you for them, and for the dynamite?’

Chiara shows me the piece in the New Islander: ‘Secret police involved in mafia raid on bandits’.

‘Chiara’, I say, ‘the world is running down and you harass me about dynamite. I bring you a marvellous object, and you show me Cecilia’s provocations. The trouble is, you women never catch anyone and you leave me hemmed in, too close to people who might kill me.’ She is prim. ‘It’s not a gender question, Hopper. We are a service agency, not an exterminator firm. And lots of things are missing from the stores.’

‘They usually are,’ I say.

‘The world here is not run down, you know. It’s trundling on. But what it lacks from you – apart, of course, from tenderness, a real emotional grip, a person behind that Polaroid – is what we need to show we’re human. In a word – complicity. Like Nadia. Nadia had it.’

Chiara is always pushing and nudging, as though I am a missing piece of something, and if she gets me in position, she wins a jackpot. Or perhaps she just treats people funny. Maybe she comes from Philadelphia, and I smile, and she does too, not knowing me, nor Philadelphia.

 

 

* * *

 

 

I have frequent visits from Bozo’s men: ‘The Lord’s my shepherd.’ And there’s a succession of police commissioners, some of them quite old, and male – delving in the flaking archaeology of the service. Some are married to colonels and generals in other arms of the state, and I imagine their uniforms intertwined on the bedroom floor. A postcard from Dr Bhad arrives:

 

I have devised for my former colleagues a suitably redemptive task. I have started up a coffin factory on the premises – but I need supplies. Perhaps you’d intercede with Tonino, but please stress – it must be wood, not paper. Here we are traditionalists. Go easy on the lids.

And remember, my dear friend, in all the world the petty bourgeoisie is taking over. Tearing things down, putting them up, remaking police forces, hanging them from pylons. Triumph of the people in the square – and into the offices for steady jobs.

Be very, very careful. It’s not at all your scene. I tremble for you here. I make every effort to get out and give you strength. Besides, after a while in here you need to see the city streets, cement uprising, wallpaper.

 

I am touched. But the police are infinitely intrusive. They ask me, ‘Would you body search Mr Bozo?’ and detail every crack. The more my power, the greater is the threat.

This is no good, this is no fun. The police ask about revolution, but mostly they ask about the stores. And only I see everything with clarity. I am thankful for grade school, that made me sane for life, but these colleagues are fading at the edges. Is it to them order will be entrusted? Chiara comes and holds my chair as they are questioning me. She wears a range of perfumes, of the jungle and the plain, trying, perhaps, to raise what she calls tenderness, but now it seems that kind of inflammation one first has when shaking hands with Dr Bhad.

It’s like Brazil, a place where everything happens all at once, and centuries pass every morning; millennia, crammed in to afternoons, are gone while you’ve been dozing. And nothing moves. The bus stands with its trolley jazzing off the wires, everything is breaking down in samba time. And yet, like here, someone is making money, thinks it worth their while to squeeze this jabbering mango. Assisting in the questioning here, there show up groups of Czechs and Chinese, ready to be ready for anything.

And I am not quite victim, not quite colleague. When I can, I play tric-trac with the Moroccans. My dummy show is drawing tourists now. Most think I’m the author of some kind of massacre, and pay me tributes, Polaroid me. There’s even talk of pilgrimage, if they can find some kids to have a vision, there will rise a church, complete with Moroccans selling lighters.

I think it is important not to panic. I sit there in my shades, denying it all, from Paraguay to Dublin. Cecilia writes everything up, her plots more fertile than my own.

And Thistle too must scribble away, sliding underground between his worlds, the pastures and the hideyholes, the squares, the benches, instant Athens where he can harangue the tourists.

‘Fish remind me of snakes,’ Giusy is saying in the bar, ‘I can’t bear to touch them,’ and Corrado says, ‘Well, fish are snakes. But remember back in ’78, they threw confetti at Don Angelo and rice went in his ears? They tried to get it with a knife, for fear that it would sprout ...’ There is enough tradition here to last another thousand years, I think, except that there is almost nowhere left for me to go. All the squares on this monochrome board are blocked by friends, and one of them, Tonino, may have by now devised that ultimate, implosive couplet, which will outdo all other opiums and be engraved on capbadges and be part of every police oath – and it will be the ultimate pop or snort or pill-burst and it will give eternal health and life and ecstasy to everyone but me.

One of the Czechs asked Chiara, ‘But will he run away?’ – and she said no, of course not. Just like Corrado says – ‘You? Run? But where? There’s sea all round.’ And Robinson found that out, if he was really running to get away, and found his island, that it was the ultimate trap. From which someone else must rescue you, with all the while poor dumb Fridays wafting in on rafts. And I thought – ‘run away? Just look at those fine back legs, all folded neat away, just like a pair of parade trousers. A body made for super hopping.’ But where?

And Chiara has this bittersweet constraint that police are allowed to exercise on prisoners, this loves-me-loves-me-not that certainly requires and has no reciprocation. Beneath my window they are arguing about castrating calves: ‘With bricks, you mole turd’, ‘with hot knives, you granny’s skull’, and I feel proud of my title, printed on the postcards of me, standing in front of my wooden victims – a style somewhere between the thirteenth and the nineteenth century – ‘the last sane man in Europe.’ And I think of sending one to Jones.

 

 

 

ten

 

 

Chiara has had a threat. ‘How was it?’ I ask.

‘Unmistakable. Unforgettable.’ I’m gratified to see she’s trembling. She says, ‘It’s signed “Bozo’s army”. I thought there was only one Bozo.’

I say, quickly, ‘Threats – I get them all the time. And about the Bozo, I was working on a hypothesis—’

‘First me, then, “when you have taken it fully in” – you. There’s nothing for it. You must be shipped to the continent.’

I say, ‘It doesn’t seem the time.’ I mean, it seems the Time, but not the Way.

But she is complimented. She thinks I want to stay and take the risk with her. And at least it wasn’t I who sent the note. And yet, I do recall Corrado said, ‘We should help the old runner here, get him a bit of peace.’

I have a notion: ‘If we check our records we shall see who is the next victim, because the carpenter must have notice to carve the face.’

She says, ‘What good does that do? If it’s me, I’m the police. I already watch myself all day.’ I think, or we could watch the leather sacks and copper staves – but then again, suppose they use a gun or dynamite.

I suggest, ‘We could watch everybody.’

‘It’s being done. And doubly watched by Thistle and your friends, and by the enemies of Thistle and your friends. And by informers in the bars. And so, though everyone is watching, what do we see? Each other. Neither more nor less. And human qualities? What of them?’ I feel it is an odd appeal to essence at this stage. Perhaps the priests have given her an extra guarantee. I have all mine, I keep them in a special wallet, including one that comes from a pair of dirty gods in Recife, pinned down with infinite trouble, and forced to swear on my behalf.

‘You’re lucky you have friends,’ she says.

‘My friends are for themselves, I fear, besides, they couldn’t keep the engine running ...’ I think of our banking appointment in Asunción, and Adnan who had turned the engine off when we were anxious to be gone, and couldn’t start it, because it was the kind of car that sits there dumb until you’ve found the seatbelts, every last one, and if you’ve sacks, and bread sticks, things acquired and smoking hot and half the city running … and I trust you even less, Chiara, but no doubt you’d say it was a thing to be got over, and not a piece of friendly nature speaking clear to me.

And perhaps I shall be shipped out. I think, ‘No one here can hit a moving target,’ and think of my grey body flipping up into the woods, Corrado watching from the distance, and saying, ‘Look at those legs – the top of his thighbones are taller than his ears.’ The police have gone to a lecture. The barracks are empty. I poke about the records. The age of writing is disappearing. As an archaeologist, I go down to the stores. Almost everything is missing. The abundance is of things that will not fit. There is old paper everywhere. That literacy should end so.

I sit idly outside, and a lady tourist says to her mate, ‘Look at that grey hopper there, cleaning his legs,’ so I go inside again and practise being very quiet and still at Chiara’s desk, just practising being, and changing colours as the clouds pass over the sun. She has hidden mail for me in her desk. There is a letter from Jones:

 

Whatever it costs, I shall need a large palace on the island, preferably without access. See what you can find. My colleagues lack the finer vision. They don’t see that drugs are the wrong way. They think deviants stop them making money and getting votes. They do not search. Or, rather, they are now searching to find ways of getting rid of me. My Paraguayan passport has not helped (you remember, I bought one while we were closing our account in Asunción). Also they suspect my rhetoric, and my degree from Athens – not in Greece, as I explained, but Arkansas. But they insist on stupid racist slurs, and call me Jones the Greek. So, dear friend, my time is up. Goodbye England. It’s ‘out of populism and back to the sects’. Hence the palace. For you, there is always a job: security guard, fireworks operative. It grieves me Adnan is going on so strong. For I had thought to do him down, as the poet says. But his Arabs have remarkable qualities, adapt­ing to everywhere, even to Paris, as if it were all desert. What this means is – you can no longer count on my protection. We may all have to rely on Dr Bhadhyopadhyay yet ....’

 

The letter had been opened.

I wonder if Jones will find recruits, even on the nameless island. Young people are so elusive now. They just walk and shop, and brush us mothy old things aside. But the good doctor’s postcard is a marvel:

 

Your faith has been rewarded, my good hopper, and my gifts no less. Experiments with herbs and powders going along, I noticed that my mates succumbed with difficulty even to my skills. Overcrowding and robust health became again a problem. In Madras, the people are so full of poisons, my poisons make them well. That, in short, allowed me to devise a laboratory funded by the public, loyal and dedicated to the truth. The fact is, that from nature – as I know it from my books, and those of Adnan’s Arab doctors – I can extract no lethal poison. I have become a seer of life, a chemist of the therapy of venoms (in small doses, to avoid indigestion). In short, I am proposed for the Nobel, and, of course, freed. Though scientific work is worse than what I had fixed up in jail. I shall be arriving to collect the herb sardonion, which I need for experiments on the fixed, or mirthless, smile.

 

Dr Bhad has been forcibly converted to humanism, and Jones in the reverse direction. My fortunes dip and rise like swallows. We should expect, after the embarrassed landing of Jones’s party, a more consistent one of Arabs. But Adnan will still cover me, and Jones will have a hideaway. I tidy up the desk, and Chiara finds me poking at the documents. I say: ‘I have many things to tell you about crime.’

She tells me they have had a briefing, and will all go to sea to watch the island fires, to stop the contraband, and ‘think of a name that meets the island’s new realities. “Fish Rock” will not do that job.’ So there will be a competition and a plebiscite, and the police, the thin blue line that stands between our civilisation and the wild men and their silent women, will be the judges and the scrutineers. ‘They’ll see how much they rely on us, for naming and defining things.’

‘Chiara,’ I say, ‘I have to tell you things that every policeman ought to know. Almost everyone here lives from crime, and everyone, but everyone, knows all about it. The killings are not the cause of anything, they are the result, the justice setting right the transgressions. Not sheep but pastures: not pastures for grazing, but for building, not money for making cheese or even for kidnapping, but dirty money from the continent laundered through our banks. Arrest them all. Arrest me, if you want. This is the result of my investigation, unpaid and unwanted. A preliminary list of names is here’ – dramatically, I pass her the phone book – ‘and to achieve full justice, all you need is to cut off flights and ferries. So the island – of “Miranda”, if you’ll take my suggestion, on which I have gambled heavily already – will become a prison and go on, a poorer and a wiser version of what it is at present. Thereby, I may say, also solving the problem of modernity and its growing pains. The community becomes a prison, and the rules are uniform. The old ways rule. No TV in the cells.’

She is unmoved. ‘So, you have earned your pay at last. But not from us because it seems that as Jones hired you, so he is responsible for seeing to your money, but we see ...’ she finds a telegram, ‘that there is a problem with his ministry, that certain armaments and crates and general kinds of things may have been exported inadvertently without the right documentation. So we should be wary of his paperwork, I think.’

‘What’s done is done,’ I say. ‘Besides, what I have told you is real dynamite.’ She winces.

‘Hopper, of course you’ve told the truth. The truth that everyone knows, and cannot tell. On all this crime we cast a cold, not unbenevolent, eye. If we are here, the honours are preserved. We in our barracks, the bandit in the hills, the smuggler at sea, the killer on the corner, the banker in his bank. Big boss and little boss, inspector and flatfoot. Not running down, not run down, Hopper, just running. Hierarchy, Hopper: haven’t you heard of it? Power, Hopper. Money, Hopper. Not your things at all. But, in your way, good Hopper, faithful Hopper – even faithful to poor Nadia, in your fashion.’

‘Ah yes, Nadia. An odd reaction. The boy with the convertible skull was a mistake. The cousin of her Bozo. She was relieved it wasn’t him, or her.’ I remember her thoughtful blankness.

Chiara moves into her chair. ‘Well, you don’t expect us to live here like nuns? But who was the killer? Nadia’s boyfriend, out of jealousy? Someone setting you up and threatening you? Or someone trying to get rid of a rival to you? Or something else again – the lad suspected of informing for the Army—’

I ask, ‘Your army, or his?’

Chiara says, ‘Of course there is crime and killing. Just as there are always cops around. What do you expect us to do, stop it? Have all your friends converted to humanism now?’

I say, ‘I don’t think Adnan has,’ but I am shaken. Someone has opened the top of my head, poured in a handful of ideas, like long nails, and is stirring them around. It is, too, another truth that I had always suspected. We are not here to change things. That’s what the priests were saying, and why they don’t bother here. No one wants to change anything at all, and the trouble comes from trying to preserve the primal balances. So much for True Communism, mine or theirs.

Chiara has me breathless, and she is muttering, ‘Miranda’s Island, indeed. Illegal gambling on the results. That’s the real plague. That’s what generates the idleness and the bottom-pinching for which we must mobilise this year, to protect our sisters from the continent ...’

I puff myself up and say, ‘Yes, but here there is a politics, a ritual, a language we mostly don’t see or understand.’

‘We don’t meddle,’ she says. ‘We don’t meddle with their balances and hierarchies.’

‘But they use you. They suck you in.’

She agrees, and I persist, ‘So what are you doing here?’

‘And you?’

I am clean: ‘Running away. And I know all the arguments about sisterhood. You wait a while, and see if power has gender.’

She is irritated. ‘OK, I’ll give you truth, lots of it. About Darya and Nadia. Darya wanted at all costs to leave the island, and so informed for us. And Nadia wanted at all costs to be happy, and so informed for both sides. Nadia was indifferent to justice, and so involved innocent people. She broke the rules, so brought down chaos.’

‘She broke the rules, so brought down chaos,’ I say.

‘Well, Hopper,’ says Chiara, ‘If you can’t tell the difference between justice and chaos, the police is not the career for you. And yet – I thought you had a future. Even in politics.’

She must mean she wanted to push me for their candidate if autonomy came close. That’s why it was so easy to lose the Paraguayan file. And I’m still using the logic of the building block. Chiara goes on, ‘And so, poor things, Darya and Nadia tried to buy their way out of the tangle, and not with cakes, dear friend. They tried to buy safety with their bodies, and they were betrayed by them. By this weakness.’

And I think – yes, Chiara is a great, a very great policeman: perhaps the greatest of the century, greater far than disembodied Holmes, or Inspector Faz that Bhadhyopadhyay is always on about, who specialised in mass murders interspersed with natural deaths and finished as a pavement locksmith in Mysore, a monstrous killer and prodigious pervert at whose name the corner thieves still slyly bite their thumbs in reverence ...

I say to Chiara, ‘These are truths I could have done without’, and it is with relief that I go to talk to Thistle as he lies feigning holy drunkenness on his marble bench.

‘I think some friends of mine are coming, and they will be complications for you.’ As usual the bars are watching us, instead of bead curtains there are long fringes of eyes at every door, but it is quiet. Like on that first day, the sheep, the hammers, go tin-tin-tin-tin; and fortunes are quietly made and staked. It suddenly strikes me that we cannot consume so many cars: they must be working over the numbers on them, and those container ships that come from Naples ...

Thistle is wary of me. He says, ‘Bozo is sleeping now, the theatre was a laugh, but now he’ll wait until the sun is weaker. Doesn’t want trouble with the tourists.’

I say, ‘The girls have decided to renounce Bozo for the season, so what will he do now, poor thing, or they, poor things?’

He gives me his goat-eye: I’m inedible. ‘No wonder they don’t like you there,’ he says. ‘They think you’re a trigger-happy sexist prig.’

‘Who says I want to be liked?’ I ask. ‘And my friends are keen to meet you and your brother Bozo and his twins.’

He shows interest, collects a gob but does not spit. He waits.

‘A minister from England,’ I dangle for him. ‘And one from France, who both may holiday here. A famous doctor, benefactor of mankind and then,’ I can’t encapsulate Tonino, who has never been a benefactor. ‘An inventor of things that make your life flash by.’ Leaving himself in credit.

Thistle spits, ‘The four horsemen. Some great race,’ and is impressed.

‘I’m showing you that they’re unmarketable, so don’t have any of them kidnapped. And they’re unbreakable, so don’t waste silver bullets,’ I say.

He looks lazily at me: ‘There aren’t any silver bullets. Box in the stores has gone. The stores have gone. Must be a hole there somewhere.’

He is fishing, and I think: at least I got what I shall need. ‘So,’ he asks, ‘Who is your champion?’

‘The big man,’ I tell him. ‘You will recognise him from the start. He’s as tall as Mammon standing on God’s shoulders, and as tricky. Throw your best at him – but you’ll find he has a message that will change your lives.’

Tonino has never appealed to me. Not just his power of attracting money that sets your pockets twitching, nor his height that makes talking to him such an exercise. It’s his air of prophet gone badly wrong, the spiritual leader organising trips into the desert from which no tribes return, a sensibility that dreams of Taj Mahals and turns out pokerwork, prevision of the future of the president and ends in selling him some crystal balls.

I say, ‘The ayatollah is a fatalist, you’ll find him the most dangerous foe. He’s full of faith and cynicism, and his arms could crush a tank.’ I think, ‘especially one of our rusty ones’, but Thistle is already leaving: ‘I’m sure Bozo will give him a good shaking. And Cecilia can tell everyone.’

The thing would be, not winning, nor yet losing, but to present a worthy champion. Then I think, ‘what for?’ What is at stake here for me? No longer truth, for I have too much of that already, and it is too late to make me wise, and it doesn’t change my life. It makes me suffer for Darya and Nadia, wriggling on their hooks, but Chiara says this pity is another proof that I can’t grasp the need to be, to look, but not to meddle, not to stick my finger in the works and try to change the time. ‘You failed to change the world,’ she says, ‘When you were in Brazil. And then in Paraguay you played at being the exploding spider or the Catherine wheel’ (‘without the Catherine,’ I thought) – ‘And now, you must do what I tell you, or I’ll leave you to your fate.’

She means that she will invent me one, at Bozo’s hands. A great, yes, a very great policeman, and a punisher, whose results are got by not meddling. Death takes its course, the files are closed and go to fill the empty boxes in the stores.

 

 

 

eleven

 

 

Tonino is coming, man without fear. He went back to get his share in Paraguay, and when I heard, I said, ‘You went back to Paraguay? No one goes back, ever. Even if they’ve left nothing there, they don’t go back. And if they leave a thing, they run and run, and never think of it except in dreams. You dig in that hole, you find your own bloody head in there. Not your money, out that hole you pick your head, my friend.’

But he says vaguely, ‘Something that was mine ...’

His faith in property is unshakeable, and in Qom he finds a band of followers to whom all currency is good, though some more useful and desirable than others, and so he is all one: studying his coins for couplets that will drive out crack, distributing his texts, those hostages to faith: ‘Promise to pay the bearer’, ‘On demand’, ‘In God we trust’ ‘Negotiable by bearer only at the Presidential Bank’, ‘Life is sweet, investment sweeter’, ‘Forgers may be mutilated’. He is at home in this, he has the keys to confidence and the irons to sear the renegades, the falsifiers, and those who count the top note twice, crink, crink.

The people here have one dimension more, or one dimension less, than me. We are not noticed, as we walk through them or slide up and down their walls like documents. In any case, what they are engaged in is a very complex game. And if you jog their arms or whisper where the aces are, you’ll end up like poor Nadia. Wanting a dimension more, a dimension less. I’ve given up understanding, changing, acting. The plot, after all, is fairly plain, the film is just run through and through. We hardly trouble ourselves to watch – and then we find the whole thing’s jumped or torn, with wild black celluloid like smoke filling our projection room, and characters all bleeding on the floor and every minute little kids and dogs come slithering off. It’s up to us to stick them back –there aren’t that many scenes, and anomalies aren’t noticed. So, who is hurt by this? Chiara says – ‘I don’t know.’

I hear the dynamite go off as I am in the middle of a difficult tract of sleep. It’s made to make a bang, and blows the barracks’ doorway off. Everyone is deafened and the cops and I are staggering round in silence. At night, all I dream is films, and so, with everyone half dressed it looks like Keystone City, half a reel and chase to go. Chiara asks me how I would describe the noise, for her report – ‘a crump, a plaff, a boom? You being outside will hear it so much better, and it’s important that I get it right.’ It’s a priority that makes me like her, and I say, ‘It was a bang. A little hollow, but a bang. That was what they wanted it to be.’ And I thought all the stuff had been used up, myself preferring not to leave explosive around, but to have a good time with it all at once, and then be able to take off clothes and close the windows while I sleep, instead of waiting for the residue.

‘This is a new one,’ says Chiara, professionally. ‘They can’t hope to intimidate us; we’re scared already.’

I say, ‘I expect you’ll find it was a way of getting rid of some of the explosives – the best place is an armoured door. Besides, it may be another threat for you, and then they’ll think of me.’ But there is something wrong: how do we police come into what goes on?

Tonino arrives. I had forgotten how tall he was, especially on an island without straight trees he seems a portent, a mast waiting to be cut down and mounted, hung with ropes. To me, he is always the carpenter – the shaper of the thing he is. He is taciturn, precise. He must seem a terrible pain to birch trees, even the oaks must find him rigid.

I say, ‘Tonino, old musketeer, old chiseller – I need your judgement on some faces. Perhaps too on your explosive anti-drug’ – and at the word explosion he jumps. The piazza has shifted sideways, as if the planking on an ark had shifted in the nursery turmoil and was showing a tumbled hold of pythons, rhinos and the rest. But beneath the square there’s wine cellars, little prisons, formal and informal, places where litterateurs and carbonari met.

He says, ‘I heard of your attachment to the cops. Ah well, the chances for illicit gains are great, I’m sure. But even so, it seems a rather serious way of getting it.’

I think of the volleyball, and agree. I ask about Qom, but he continues talking of the sheep he’s seen, ‘They form some curious circles, like the contour lines on hills, or again the icing on a mud cake, or perhaps something that Adnan’s spectacular might emulate – all France covered by a tapestry, perhaps.’

I say, ‘Adnan is strong on pan-Arabism these days.’

His eyes have not left Qom, and he sees it clearly now before him. ‘Yes, but I fear that in Iran the project has gone rather wrong. The bits, the problems, even the alternatives, they got quite right. And then,’ he draws himself up, two metres, his eyebrows like two flocks of black sheep, the eyes two finely turned black olives, his caftan stained with saffron, ‘They somehow got it wrong, got the assembly wrong. And they put’ – a long pause, while the wine in the holes is sampled, broken glass swept in, away – ‘they put it all together, but I fear’ – he glares – ‘arse backwards.’

Silence. He goes on, ‘It may be to do with their not being Arabs, and so not knowing about the money thing. The respect thing.’

‘But you found the couplet, the opium? The new instant high, the couplet?’

‘In due course I shall reveal it to you, for it is the secret of life – my life.’ He is laughing now, but it is hard to excavate anything funny in what he’s said. I laugh, and say again, ‘the faces and the wood they’re made of?’

He looks at the fake bodies in the tent. ‘Very Adnan,’ he comments. ‘They have a curious expression, a fixed, a mirthless smile,’ and I laugh again, thinking that Dr Bhad is coming on his mission for his herb, and feel as if the good Robinson was to be rescued by his drinking chums, who laugh at him, his clothes, expedients, having a black slave, and off the bottle for a while and seeing God and shouting psalms – a bit like what he always did at home ...

‘The wood,’ says Tonino, ‘is not cut new. These faces are all made from gourds, or calabashes, even of bowls. A South Sea origin, a kind of rigid balsa, with the features just stuck on,’ and he gouges off a carrot nose, a painted mussel-shell for eye. ‘Tropical,’ he says, and puts the face down, as if it had been a vegetable, the features underneath.

So, wood from Robinson’s island. ‘And the name?’ I ask. ‘It mustn’t have a name,’ says Tonino. ‘Give it a name and you must make it real. You can’t do that, I think, nor do you really want to.’

I meant the wood and not the island, but it’s all the same.

Cecilia interviews Tonino, and they are at once attracted.

I tell him, ‘Mind her headlines, Tonino,’ and she says, ‘The man in the backroom puts those on.’ Tonino pretends to be solicitous with me. ‘I find you cast down, Hopper. Is the search for truth too much?’

‘I find the truth makes me nauseous.’

For Cecilia, Tonino represents success, and Thistle is bogged down in being many things, and ultimately none. She takes as jokes what Tonino thinks is funny, and as jokes what he says quite seriously. It makes life easy for them both. I ask him, ‘How did the currency dealing go?’

He says ponderously, ‘Circulation is very important there, a service. Alas, they are in love with death, starting with the youngest – the old ones never seem to die. They fester.’ He asks me what has happened on the island, which he calls ‘Croesus’s island’. I tell him: ‘There have been deaths. Someone put her tongue in my ear. And she is dead. I think my chief loves me or hates me. If they kill her, then I’m next. There is lots of armament about. Everything is being bought and sold, and populism’s rife. We are, you see, a part of the world.’

Tonino says, ‘The trouble is that over there, they just aren’t Arabs. Somehow got it wrong. Not good with money, and they have, with all this modern stuff, religion and all that, cooked up a nasty crock of shit.’

Cecilia thinks it’s funny, but he just talks like that – Luther without his princes and his knights.

He is short of cash. He tries to pay for drinks with forints, puts them away and says, ‘Perhaps next year.’

I say, ‘And yet you, we, did make a fortune?’

He smiles, a mirthless smile: ‘That kind is easy, with the fireworks going off, and good friend Hopper here was hopping ...’ Cecilia chuckles as though she can see Torino starting to count his share, the sirens and the fireworks going off, the whole world coming down, and Adnan grinding at the car’s insides, Jones quite green and remembering all the bible and some prayers as well. Tonino is the champion, chosen – by me, it’s true – to combat Bozo. Selected on grounds of his height, just like Goliath.

Cecilia asks, ‘How did you become wealthy, Tonino?’ and he looks at her as if she were a Daisy Duck and he the rich one – ‘I always insist on not less than ten per cent in any transaction I’m involved in. Cash,’ he says. And it’s true, but Cecilia thinks it’s marvellous, and modest.

‘Tell her about the wood,’ I say. He tells her, in the same words he used to me. She says, ‘No one has been to the South Seas here.’

‘Of course they have,’ I say. ‘No island is an island. In the winter everyone goes off on tours. Why even Thistle, when he’s bored goes to the South Seas and buys gourds for whittling in the summer.’ I wish I had not brought Tonino here, and Dr Bhad is coming too – and then remember they are coming on their own account, running fairly fast.

‘Not a carpenter’s job,’ he says. ‘No trees. More like a shepherd’s work. An Arab hand, perhaps, but not the face ... Unless an Arab made a bowl, and someone stuck the features on. Quite a different imagin­ation, that I’ve heard defined as kitsch. Or someone in the souvenir trade. A gourd, you see, is something like a vegetable, not wood.’ He spends his thoughts as if he’s counting currencies, lots of them,  but all printed to look the same. I think of poor Friday, hoping that chance would let him drift to Australia and instead being ‘found’ by bloody Robinson, sentenced to a life of education in high-grade Protestantism and low-grade tacking things together. I think:

‘If you’re so clever, Robinson, why did your ship sink?’

‘Since you ask, poor savage Friday, God was in my pocket and did waft me up, just like a life vest, or a balsa-wood canoe.’

‘Trouble with you, Robinson, is you cheat.’

‘Trouble with you, Friday, is you don’t know how.’

I think of Tonino’s complacency and self-assurance stretching away inside like blanched tripe, or parchments ready to have things copied onto them. Cecilia takes him off to see the sights. I see her pointing at the wall blackened with urine, by the bar, and he puts an arm round her shoulders, king log in the plumage of king stork. I miss Jones’s interest in himself, an interest so fussy it’s like the interest of wasps in sticking mud on to their rickety and uncomfortable nest. And yet Tonino’s calm has carried him, the galleon whose stately waltz means that it’s waterlogged, into our confidence. Tonino is too, like Jones, and Adnan, Dr Bhad, a great, indeed a very great man – so that that morning in Asunción it must have seemed that not four but five apocalyptic horseman had arrived – myself, of course, addition by a later hand, as modest Mr Truth ... fire spitting out. The noise.

Chiara asks me, ‘Who’s that warrior?’

‘The richest man in Paraguay. Inventor of a new religion, destroyer of criminals by a word. And other things we’ve not had time to talk about. To do with Bozo.’

She says, ‘He sounds a terrible bore, but he’s made a hit with Cecilia,’ and indeed they are bobbing off to the scrub behind the football field, he like a pair of sheets wrapped round a clothes prop, and Cecilia walking as if her clockwork’s boiling over.

Chiara says vaguely, ‘Over there, there’s art, music. The soft life. Discussing, museums. You must find it hard here. But perhaps your time is nearly over.’

She waves towards the continent. I say, ‘It is all one. What’s here goes back, and so on, like the tide. Washes someone up, Tonino, or me. A cuddle in a tomb, and then – ploff, while you’re watching the bean soup, it all ends.’

She is staring at me, fascinated. ‘A cuddle in the grave – it sounds like something literary. You should write it down before you forget it.’

Tonino races back. ‘I have seen it all. An army, emplacements, earthworks, laid out like the contours on a map.’ He hugs Cecilia, who smiles smugly. And has betrayed Thistle and Bozo for some reason, to keep things moving.

Chiara says, ‘It’s prehistoric. The whole island’s laid out like a fort. Over the centuries, people have come and added bits or rounded them by living in them. But that’s it. And the people – is always armed, is always in an insurrectionary state, a civil war like gears in gear boxes. It’s no paradise.’

Tonino is excited, ‘No, no paradise, but a garden, yes, a garden of addicts. The garden where the assassins trained, and reached their high. A warriors’ garden – where you look for the act of violence, of revenge, or holy redemption. The stab in the back that cancels out the fall. But, alas, it can’t be cancelled out.’

I say, ‘Tonino knows about these things, and holy wars and such – a part of being human I can do without. But so what? You’re just describing what we know.’

Tonino has achieved his life’s understanding. ‘Two things are lacking. First, the warriors will not take the commercial, the oriental drugs,’ and I thought of Jones inveighing against ginseng and take-out curries. ‘They are a poison, an insidious arm that marks defeat. And second – there is no foe. The police’ – he puts an arm round Chiara – ‘delightful, shapely and self-sacrificing, are not the foe. They are the ineliminable middle. They are in between,’ he shouts, dislodging Thistle from his bench. This time Thistle is really drunk. His eggs and olives hop about the square, he prepares to chase them, then lies down.

Tonino, however, gives the impression it is he, not Thistle who is biblically, maniacally drunk. ‘The warriors fight each other and they do not have the WORDS. Nor do they have the FOE. So, there is no victory, and no rest.’

Cecilia recites, ‘Then there is no defeat, and that’s good too,’ but Tonino pushes her aside. I wonder why he didn’t just make money from his trade in Qom, why he bothered with the heroic gestures. But he did go back to Paraguay, and no one did that just for the cash they’d hidden.

‘The bowls,’ he roars, and I wonder how every piece of the puzzle can be scrunched into its neighbour to make a monstrous incoherent blob, but, overall, complete the square – ‘The bowls are the victory bowls. They’re for the feast. And now they become the mocking faces of the dead, the dead-by-chance, the quiet and casual dead, unarmed.’ He raises a final storm, ‘Not carrot noses, you bloody stupid cops, it’s ritual food.’

He has spoken, and given his answer. It makes as much sense as most. A journey on a mule makes sense, at least to the mule, once you have climbed on its back. I ask, ‘The mussel eyes – surely that’s not food?’

But Chiara is bewitched. Looking at the three of them, a new dimension clings to sex. That would be dynamite, imported to Brazil! Chiara says, ‘Incredible. I was talking about literature to Hopper here, and now his friend is quoting poetry, about the “mussels were his eyes” and rituals. A whole new dimension to art, to life.’

I say irritably, ‘But it is or isn’t a prehistoric army? It is or isn’t Tonino’s fable? And as for champions – there’s nothing in the stores to fight with. And besides, it seems to me that to fight won’t be the cops, and whoever fights has got to lose ...’

They are looking at me, but I quickly suggest Tonino as a more suitable candidate.

The light of the island acts like a zoom, bringing closer things you would prefer not to see. Time on the island turns like a variable projector: now speeding up its scenes – the Keystone syndrome – now stringing them out. As if Warhol had made a film about sheep. I think of Schlitz, and Harlem, but there too the tourists come and spoil the fun. The light brings close some fierce activity – a group of men, and many, many sheep, all on the march. Pouring like rice grains, here and there an unhusked one. I say to Chiara – ‘That’s a big heist of sheep, in daylight too. Perhaps they want a provocation, to get us mobilised ...’

Chiara says, ‘My girls aren’t risking anything for a bunch of sheep. And what’s this “they”, Hopper? When you came, you were all for insertion here. Now they’re strangers.’

I think, and say, ‘Perhaps being a policeman is less a betrayal, but much duller than I thought. And in the last resort, not having family here, to join them just means making money.’

Chiara is amused. ‘You were certainly inept at saving Nadia, and as for making money – you leave that for your friends ...’ She stops, and I hope she remembers my volleyball court.

Tonino and Cecilia scamper to the scene of the hijack. Now, there will only be droppings, spent bullets smoking in the grass. I think, ‘If only banknotes had had little legs and bleats, money would be always on the move, and stealing would be easier,’ and then I remembered that we should all need be money-shepherds, watching all day the banknotes graze, milking off their interest twice a day, clipping the coupons of negotiable bonds ...

Chiara takes me to the office. She says, ‘Of course, despite conversion Tonino is still one of ours. A barefoot banker. Ours is still a poor country, Hopper, at least inside. But despite the Islam, Tonino is a Lombard poplar, and we should protect him.’

I say, ‘To me, he reeks of martyrdom,’ and she says, ‘But not necessarily his own. Don’t believe all you hear of Qom. He must have been quite well considered there and, moreover, a benefactor and a scholar.’

I thought of Dr Bhad’s Nobel prize. After the video-clip, the couplet – that might be the form whereby Tonino too could take his slice from the fame-mountain, shape the world’s mind. ‘Here lies a grey hopper, friend of Nobel prizewinners’ – for certainly Adnan, making a desert in Paris and calling for a peace prize, is another candidate. Even Jones, diplomat and benefactor, schismatic and gunsmith, must have his claim. A pity that his respectable phase should start from London, a city become louche and suspect in those circles.

I say to Chiara, ‘Tonino said the Lombards came from Parthia, that he was back home. I think it’s another of his errors, like where the Arabs came from.’

‘No one is very sure now, not even Arabs. When we are all one, we can choose our antecedents freely. Poor people will have the first choice of ancestors. But look at this’ – she pulls out a parchment, covered in tiny holes, converging lines. A sheepskin. ‘Do you believe in pyramidology?’ I ask politely, though I think – ‘So she doesn’t take the separatism case too seriously. And perhaps the loss of Nadia marked the limit of her intervention ...’

‘It’s an organigram, Hopper. An organisational chart. Here am I,’ and she points to a point near the base. ‘These are the people interest­ed in me,’ a long slanting line. ‘Over here are politicians, up to the party secretaries. Here is the secret chamber. I show you this because you ought to know, I’m very well protected.’

‘So the whole story is worked out? Where’s the top? And where am I?’

‘You’re on another chart, the office one. And there is no top, but other charts exist – in fact, everyone has her chart. Here I am near the bottom. On others, near the top. And of course there is no ending to the story. We’re all human beings.’

There is silence. I have nothing to say. I feel like I did in the museum.

Chiara says, ‘I love you, Hopper,’ and it feels again as if I’d fallen into the sarcophagus. Then that might mean, along with many other things, that Nadia was not a casualty in action, but stabbed in the back by Chiara, my own back pay as punishment sequestered.

She is speaking again. ‘We are a poor country, and that is why we have to be greedy about things, especially money. But it will change, when we have harnessed all this ...’ She waves towards the window, but the sounds of car thieves have faded. It is lunchtime, even the sheep have been stolen and for once the tin-tin-tin is silent.

‘What could Thistle hope to do in all this?’ I ask, or wonder.

‘Thistle is an artist, not a politician. Bozo is the one we have to work on. Turn him around, unsettle him. You remember the pictures of the Stalin statues? They couldn’t lift them down. They had to break them up. Stalin they couldn’t turn, they couldn’t buy him, make him compromise. That’s why I admire him. But Bozo will be like the rest. Plastic.’

I say, ‘Perhaps breaking the statues up gave satisfaction?’

She smiles: ‘Poor Hopper. It wasn’t Stalin they were breaking up. They were statues. Stalin was dead. Like the wooden faces in your tent. They’re images, and you can do what you like with them. Poor Hopper, you like those statues better than the people, don’t you?’

‘I know them better than the people.’

She says, ‘Then I shall be a statue for you,’ and is silent, but I don’t know what she means, unless it is that most terrible thing, a sacrifice that I don’t want. And yet – the sacrifice would not be real. Just like, perhaps, that heroic day in Asunción. Now run its course. Has become memory and so works on, but has lost the flesh I was, the fire, the noise. Not sacrifice, not real.

The car that wouldn’t start.

I have gone beyond Robinson. This is not his island, but another. I have no idea how to start looking for a name. I have compromised myself. I cannot respond. Certainly, when the tall ships go by, I can’t shout to them. I am afraid. I’m also prudent. But once you have escaped, you’re finished. You can’t go back.

 

* * *

 

The police keep themselves apart. I see them exercising, drilling, and in fours and fives walking down the streets under the lime-trees, hand in hand. The men used two shades of uniform each year, but these dress for the weather, for the time of day. But it seems a ritual of fashion, not display. They wear tall wicker helmets. Sometimes they walk with the other girls, like nuns with the little souls. I never see them with men, but somewhere there are, there must be men. I ask Chiara, ‘Are you using them to change things?’

But she evades and says, ‘I don’t think there’s much to be done. Just lock up the stores, keep up the records,’ and I say, ‘Why is Tonino’s record on the files? And why has his photograph been scissored out.’

‘I needed to copy it.’

I think – on what? A gourd? But I say, ‘You mustn’t make me suspicious.’ She says smugly, ‘It’s your trade, Hopper. First politics, then robbing – it’s a terrible example! And very phallic, I may say.’

She smiles patiently and wisely, and I move back. ‘Politics is an expensive business,’ I say. ‘Ask your friends at the top of the pyramid.’

But Cecilia is intrigued. ‘A civil war, that’s what your boss is hoping for. Taking of sides, a general shaking out. Tonino and the Bozos – then she and the cops will lead the peaceful, the survivors.’

I say, ‘She thinks there’s only one Bozo, and what of Thistle?’

‘Thistle is finished,’ says a voice, and it is he, much diminished by the drink. He gives me two olives, as small as sheep droppings.

He goes on, ‘Thistle could live a thousand years, or just one day. It’s all the same. You can’t go back and start again. Renewal is a difficult business.’

‘And expensive,’ I say, thinking of politics in general.

‘Besides,’ says Thistle, ‘Tonino has his faith, and I have none. Physique, and mine has gone. An answer. Above all, a question.’

I am touched to see him maudlin like this, and tell him, ‘Tonino was a look-out man. That’s what he’s good at. Faith and questions – they don’t enter. If he has an answer, it’ll have come from copying something,’ but Cecilia is looking disappointed, and I think that, yes, as regards physique Thistle has lent his muscles and his blood to Bozo. When Jones comes with his clinic, or his sect, Thistle will already know the language that we all once knew. Of self, of realisation – marks that once were those of health, and now are horrible symptoms. Cecilia and I lay him on his bench, and I return the olives, hardly warm. He crams an egg in his mouth, and for a while his jaws won’t work: he is stoppered up, a victim of the word.

Cecilia sees all her fish skittering out of her pan. She says, ‘If Chiara wins – with all that backing in the capital … If Thistle lives – all those illusions thrown away. If Tonino dies – all that know-how wasted.’

The chessboard has come alive, the kings and queens galumphing round, Tonino who can run like a bishop, Thistle, knight and horse, hooves split and folded over.

I say, ‘Know-how? Tonino? Tonino is a dumb Newton who spends his life in orchards. The fall of every apple is a revelation, he doesn’t feel the bumps.’ I think – yes, he’s the perfect sacrifice.

And will we make it here, the five old friends? For one last job? This time, I’ll drive. Or will I be the only one, the others four death masks from the archive? I say, ‘At least I’ve decided. I’m going to be a survivor.’

Cecilia stops writing. Her skin is very white, it shines just like a fleece. ‘That’s incredible. That’s what Nadia said the night before she died.’ She seems terrified.

‘What’s incredible? People are always repeating themselves and other people. Chiara finds quotations everywhere, like apples in Tonino’s orchard, waiting to fall. Whump. There goes another apple. But what really matters is ...’ Getting off the island? Finding an island where one can survive because there’s no one else, only your slave? But she is entranced.

‘An orchard. Yes, that’s what we need here. To do plays in, and walk in the light of the moon. Silver apples, gold. And weak, white light ... Roses, tiny white ones.’

I feel an urge to check my stores. I remember in the good days how it made us laugh to say, ‘When socialism comes in Paraguay’, for even Jones and Dr Bhad felt themselves in some way on the side of freedom – or at least in some way victims. And now, it seemed, we had each got the freedom that we merited. Now focusing back our hopes on to my island, a kind of Paraguay, winkled from its continent and now sea-locked. Tonino’s garden for assassins – but they were after him. Cecilia there, to twine the roses round his head, and somewhere now there’s someone working on his photograph, a monstrous gourd is taking shape, is waiting to be born.

 

 

 

 

 

 

twelve

 

 

The posters have been put up, and are already torn and altered: martial arts – fight to the death. thistle headless. Tonino can run at least.

I find on Chiara’s desk a phonogram: Jones in disgrace, Adnan in triumph, Dr Bhad on parole: arriving soonest. The old world will not die, the new struggles to say its first word.

I wonder why Nadia should have been so sure she would survive. She must have felt she had her contacts on both sides, that passionate vulnerability was the clue. I try to feel some sentimental glow, that Chiara thinks is being human. But I can’t. She played her hand, and lost.

I see Tonino far off, practising lunges and back-kicks. He looks like a windmill made of broken crosses, and the sheep gather beneath his sails. Perhaps they feel a breeze, a breath, a sigh, from gardens walled, contemplative, in Qom.

Tonino says, ‘It’s all plot. That’s the trouble with being a policeman. You think you are imposing order, but you end up trying to save your skin. When we were proposing to bring the revolution to Paraguay,’ we smile, remembering the phrase, the bringing it in and the taking of the cash, as recompense, to start our shining careers, ‘we were very hot on order. At least, we were. You were more interested in firepower and how to spend your money.’

‘That’s not how I remember things,’ I say. ‘Besides, I never got any money.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you lacked the real passion. You often start to do one thing and end with others, or just some heap of crap.’ He gestures vaguely. ‘But then again, running states is like that. Sometimes you’re lucky, and it’s all like plastic, or like marble. Other times, it’s filling in the forms and shooting people. Not much to get excited over.’

‘And in Qom?’

‘Current business, my old friend. I have been ... and I am ... a force.’ Certainly, Cecilia must have seen that. ‘But the plot is very thick. Like bean soup. This is just a sideshow for me here, but I think – yes: the forces of reaction, say them yea or nay, have got too compromised here. Too muddy. They stink of death.’

I say, ‘Mind your step. Many have been sucked down. The police have you on file, and your photograph has gone.’

He says, ‘Of course. To take the documents is too obvious. Removing the photograph makes people think, and is a little guarantee. Your records are a heap of shit, if I may say.’

So, if he took it, why did Chiara – but no, there are too many beans in this soup.

‘Modernity,’ says Tonino, ‘is a word that doesn’t work. It is one distortion, facing another, not equal, not the same. Not opposed, and not compatible. As for the end of our civilisation,’ he tugs his caftan round him, and Cecilia writes away, ‘it leaves me with an open mind. I mean, on whether it is over, or if it is, how much it matters.’

‘Why Qom?’ asks Cecilia. ‘Because you were a criminal?’

Tonino looks irritated and patient. ‘We must start again, somewhere. And not exhaustion but distortion,’ he shouts as if he is dictating his will. And Cecilia takes it down. ‘Both sides distorted, but without a middle.’

I say, ‘I know. The cops are in the middle.’

He says, ‘The cops are the middle, Hopper. And you’re not that type. Come in with me, we’ll work some business out. You can sniff things now, man. Right! You’re their dog, man. Not a cop.’

I make a sign to him to go on, non-committal.

He says, ‘Is no one here quiet and mysterious?’

‘Perhaps Corrado, the carpenter,’ I say, and think, he’s working on you now, old friend, carving your face.

Tonino goes on: ‘The people here, dear friends, are fighting over scarce resources. And are the police, the women stopping that? And won’t they, don’t they, do the same?’

I start, ‘Well, certainly, when it comes to stores and salaries ...’ but he says, ‘Come on Hopper, you know the answer to people fighting over scarce resources, and it’s not in Qom, and not in catching people, sending them to jail.’

I ask, ‘Well, what did you get from Qom?’

‘A couplet that will mystify. But the answer’s just the same, old friend, same as it was in Asunción. Not firepower, Hopper, and not faith. But politics.’

He is right. I have let him down, and set him up. And I have watched Jones in his parabola, Adnan in his, and let my failure, over there, to save the world, let myself be sucked, sucked in and down.

No, the middle’s not for me, but the extremes are so extreme it makes you try to find a piece of middle. I say, ‘You’re right, Tonino, fear of death has nearly done for me.’

He embraces me and Cecilia: it is an embrace that has a share of parchments and old bones, and there’s an overpowering smell of wallflowers, which must be Cecilia. But it’s the first humane gesture since good Nadia’s cakes (I wonder how many of us were supplied?), and Chiara’s experiments. Yes, certainly Tonino’s right, though what about is far from clear. It is almost like being back in Asunción – screaming at each other in cross-purposes and apprehension. Threatening Tonino – who would not stop being a look-out, and just run away with my gun. I had forgotten his stupid courage, his dumb principles, and that mature seriousness that all we others lacked.

‘It seems to me,’ Tonino says, ‘the thing here’s like in Qom. I must set the example, make the challenge that shows I think the people round are doing the wrong thing. Although I know that’s not what they want to hear.’

‘Perhaps they’ve been told before.’

‘Yes, Hopper, of course they have. And will be told again.’ He takes out a silver coin. There is a seated archer on a stool, holding his bow out awkwardly. ‘A very great, a very legitimate king: and they repeated it for centuries, even when they were forgetting how to write and it turned into a videoed logo. And they were very great kings. They still are.’

I say, ‘But dead. And no longer legitimate, just very great.’

He says, ‘Exactly. What do you expect, that things go on for ever? Repetition. That is important.’

I think ‘you should know’, but for one who is to go into combat, which will be unique, that seems unfair. I wonder what the greatness of a great king consists in, and looking at Cecilia, I understand. She is the loving daughter of the great, mad king, his kingdom now a camp of thieves, ready – though they may not know it – for Tonino’s socialism.

 

* * *

 

Jones and Adnan arrive on the same plane. Adnan’s bodyguards have brought windsurfs, and clearing them and Jones’s curtain rods through customs takes a morning. Jones cannot and Adnan won’t, pay the officers to speed them through. Jones is jiggering as if his shoes are full of tarantulas, and in the airport lounge he takes them off. Adnan says, ‘Not here, Jones, not here. We all wear shoes here,’ but it is a mark of Jones’s unease, his rage at being fired, his projects shredded: he whispers to me, ‘The bastard said “Tell me what’s important and I’ll shred it: the trivial I’ll keep.”’

‘Who?’

‘The bastard. The next poor bastard. Bastard.’

He is full of disgust and self-pity, his jaws can’t bear to stay together. It is as if he has eaten a dead dog covered in paprika.

‘Steady, Jones,’ I say. ‘We shall rise again,’ but Jones mutters something about seas of blood, and how he will outdo King Bluebeard, and I think, ‘Another great, a very great king’, and wonder, since Jones was no king, who his superiors were. I talk to him about his castle, which has no access. He says, ‘I shall lick my wounds, and rule over waves of melancholy:’

Adnan has won their little contest, but I tell him, ‘Adnan, we’re really crowded here. It’s true that when I came it seemed there was just me, and maybe Robinson and Friday. And then a regiment of small and almost silent tanks, the shepherds and their sheep, a few fixers, and the cops. But now – we seem to fill the island. With your desert tribes, your pools of labour – perhaps you should look for a larger surface. Rivers, a mountain range. Surely your country still has some unoccupied plains, some uplands?’

He is annoyed. ‘I might as well leave them where they are, according to you. What would they do?’

‘What do we do? What should we do?’ I ask.

‘Move over,’ he says.

I start to explain I don’t control such things, when there is a shouting and the bodyguards are running down the hall, about to launch a bundle spilling eggs and olives which is screaming, ‘I’m asleep.’

It is Thistle, and a bodyguard says, ‘Drunks in the minister’s presence are an insult,’ but now Thistle is more dead than drunk.

Adnan and Jones both see him as central to their purposes, and Jones’s spirits rise as the old recruiting fever bites again, driving out the other fires and aches.

They all begin to thrive, and Thistle, once more suspended between being wholly victim and wholly leader, perhaps in the molten glass of his pastures, thrives most of all. Jones tells him pompously not ‘to deny the necessity of his own existence’, and Adnan, dismissing me as a fascist, is asking if the sheep could not be removed and the tribes resettled, ‘like they did in Israel’.

I introduce them to Chiara: Jones’s records are in a cardboard box, but Adnan’s come in a slim leather case, monogrammed, and with the French Republic’s coat of arms. I feel proud that we have all won through, and that even Dr Bhad’s travails with nature, an existence prickly and inflamed, may find a further soothing element on this – still nameless – island.

Chiara says, frostily, ‘All you friends will be glad to be together, however briefly. Thistle will know how to keep his distance, I’m quite sure. And Dr Jones will get over his … er, and join us here. The minister’ – she waves vaguely at Adnan – ‘will do his duty and be off, avoiding, as far as possible, to increase the population by his stay.’ She is regal. I see the file from Paraguay in a drawer. It is hot and steamy, like a poultice. Still, the affair might have saved the world, or at least it might have helped to pay to save a little piece.

Chiara winks at me, and I remember a casual tongue in my ear. She says, ‘As for Tonino, our Lombard friend.’ She stops. She cannot think of words to welcome, or to warn, repel us or survey us. We are pirates who make Robinson’s religious mania and his racism seem tame. No one wants pirates on an island. Adnan says, ‘Well, if that is a speech of welcome, I’ll respond. And if it’s not, I won’t.’ Tonino nods, and I hear him muttering, ‘the middle, the dead middle’, and he is whittling. ‘What are you whittling?’ asks Chiara brusquely.

‘A stick. I’m turning it into a tree,’ he says. ‘A little one,’ as if she’s mad.

‘I shall put my good friend officer Hopper to show you over,’ she says, and the others snigger, Tonino turning to laughing so hard he has to get up and look over the valley where the tin-tin-tin-tin of sheep and engine blocks is fusing together. I see Cecilia’s white skin and fluorescent pencil: she glows in a corner like an alabaster jar. Her pencil creaks and squeaks over the page. I notice her forehead is low, but the skull is domed, like a sheep’s. Chiara is saying, ‘Officer Hopper has become quite unAmerican these days. He has shed one culture, preparatory, perhaps, to acquiring another.’ She pauses. ‘More sympathetic. More feminine, perhaps.’ Tonino guffaws and Jones waggles his eyebrows up and down, separately and very fast, as he must have done in cabinet meetings.

‘Drugs,’ says Chiara, and we all start, and Jones tries to hide his embarrassment by poking out his long clean tongue, pointed and just touching the tip of his chin. Chiara is a great, a very great policeman, and I feel like hugging her and telling her that in front of them all. That would set us straight.

Instead, I hug her shoulders, and casually put my tongue in her ear. It tastes like a petunia. I say nothing as she twists towards me to see if there is any message. I say nothing, but with infinite grace and difficulty I slide the Paraguayan file out of the drawer. I go and sit down again, still silent, the file purloined.

Now we have turned the tables, Adnan and Jones look more urbane. Jones tries to make a speech, claiming his castle as a gift to internationalism. Adnan refers to the island as Sahara, but only I notice it. But it’s my wordless tongue that’s done the trick. As she leaves, Chiara looks thoughtful, and I find that after all I only took the cover of the Asunción file. Thistle sees it, ‘All to play for still,’ he says.

Cecilia’s edition is hitting the streets as we part that night: ‘Island hit by world-class crime’. I say to Cecilia – ‘You sure stir the pot,’ but she blames the man in the back room.

Tonino has talked of ‘Thistle, that unhappy, guilty boy. Who lives and thrives without laughter, all costive.’ All hopes of autonomy have gone. Between Jones and his communities, and Adnan with his tribes, there’s little for Bozo to do, except take to the hills. And as for Thistle – Chiara has told him, ‘You’re the first suspect. Morally, you’re guilty as hell, and we’ll squeeze you like a lemon, but not here. Back you go to the continent, you little brain freak.’ A very great policeman. Jones has offered Thistle therapy, and Tonino training in the martial arts. I hear Jones offering Chiara therapy too, but she’s still shaken by my tongue.

How many times have I explored the island? It’s already mine – the devil’s chimney, the cave with the false dead, the places where I found the bodies, the doors thrown down by dynamite. It is as if my violence has left its monuments all scattered round, twisted and multiform, like, well, memory. I explore it again with Adnan, Jones, Tonino. It is entirely different. But masked men with guns are guarding flocks, squatting on their heels, and whittling. They ask us who we are, and Adnan’s face is dark. He had not thought there were so many of them, Bozo’s men. Only Jones feels at home, to him walls are to put your back to, expecting danger, so the more there are, the better. He is carrying an embroidered umbrella with a spare magazine, and Adnan’s bodyguards lope behind us. They are discussing the cinema.

We discuss whether Tonino should accept a challenge, and Adnan says, ‘At all costs, he must be protected.’

We pass by the cemetery. The walls of dead, labelled and clean, make us all think of bank vaults. Jones waggles his eyebrows and crooks a finger.

Tonino stands on the edge; below’s the escarpment where they throw the flowers. He is whirling his arms, and starts to bellow, but we don’t pay attention. He is always, only, lookout man.

And then he’s gone. We see him spinning down, like a petal, like a seedpod, so slowly it seems he’ll spring up when he has passed the smear of dead flowers, passed the sheep who have time to take a mouthful and look up, past the brown rinds of cars whose weight has carried them further than the flowers.

He lands, and Jones says, ‘Oh fuck.’ I think I see a pair of fat game bags running away. I think I see a Bozo’s soldier, profile so dark and sharp: I think I see the profile of the cousin of the lad we found dead in the kitchen. I think I see the profile of the man who was Nadia’s lover. Nadia’s killer.

Tonino is all broken up. ‘He was thrown down,’ I say, and they look at me as if policemen can tell that, just by looking. They had seen no one. I say, ‘And he shouted the couplet, the drug substitute, as he fell. What he called “the opium of the addicts” – did you catch it all?’

Adnan is shaken but he says, ‘In Arabic – I couldn’t catch it, a dialect that’s difficult—’

‘I heard it,’ I say. ‘A terrible message:

“The centre is everywhere

The truth is everything.”’

A bodyguard says, ‘He didn’t find that on a coin,’ and Jones says, ‘A terrible, a horrible thing. But how true. And yet again, what does it exactly mean?’

‘There is no doubt,’ says Adnan, as we carry back the corpse. ‘He absolutely should not have fought. And if he lost, we absolutely must cancel this defeat. And cancel Tonino.’

I look in the tent with the false dead. Tonino is already there, his long legs are two twisted trunks, the face has not been varnished and the knots stick out like cysts or plague spots. They have put him across the boy and Nadia, as though he is the third that breaks a couplet. I straighten Nadia’s uniform. And I find Dr Bhad is quietly there, alive, his beautiful suit moving through its tones: a copper and a chestnut. ‘That’s a beautiful suit, Dr Bhad. It looks organic. And metallic. It must have cost a fortune, unless, of course, in some way it’s traditional ...’ I am thinking of edible cloths and acupuncture, but Dr Bhad has reached a higher level, and does not need to be told.

‘We are all disturbed by this loss,’ he says. ‘That even the police in Paraguay could not inflict. I, of course, have changed, and vengeance, I fear, is out of the question. Aside from matters of parole. But we shall find a way to recompense him, and perhaps a carving somewhere? A fitting end to that – most beautiful – couplet which, alas, belongs to cemeteries rather than the active life our organisms impose on us.’

He has become, perhaps, the greatest man of all of us, and he comes with me to Chiara, to be introduced. I am distressed that he is due to report to her every day, but he dismisses it: ‘Science is a transgression, my dear friend. Every day, we penetrate the secrets and set under way chains of events that end – who knows where? Hiroshima, the unravelling of the genetic chain? You never know, you never know. But after all, that is our frontier, and what are frontiersmen for, if not to kill Indians?’ He is very amused at his joke, but Chiara is riveted by his record.

‘All these? So many? Dead!’

‘My dear lady, the experimental method has overtaken mere speculative contemplation. I could have waited in my garden, read the alchemists – as, of course, unlike my many colleagues, I have done. But no, now nothing counts unless you prove it. In the flesh. And blood.’

‘He is a great benefactor,’ I say, to blunt Cecilia’s comments. And Chiara says, ‘No doubt,’ and Tonino’s body is taken away and filed, but it is terribly broken up, and I’m sure Chiara and I both know another step towards us has been taken – though what’s my secret, I’m not sure. Why is death moving towards me with these skittering, sideways steps? Why was Tonino’s message so – banal? Why couldn’t he be allowed to fight and, win or lose, suggest another way?

Dr Bhad lays his hand on mine, and I feel the pustules beginning to form. He says, ‘If we reveal the mysteries too soon, they won’t be mysteries any more. And so – we shouldn’t know if they had ever, really, been mysterious.’

But – poor Tonino, and poor Nadia, and poor too the boy who watched his last bean soup.

The next day Chiara calls me. We have all suffered from that death, Tonino’s body all broken up, and with no staves, no ritual of the bag. Just the body like a ball of feathers slanting down. Chiara says, ‘The good news is, we are moved by your friend’s death, and so shall overlook the wake last night. The shooting off the escarpment, the tracer out to sea, and then the torchlight parade, the bodies from your exhibition – part of our archive, I might say. All of that will be forgotten, like a drunken spree.’

I say, ‘It was our friends, not us,’ but she says quickly, ‘Yes, I know, it always is one’s friends. Or friends of friends of the dead. For you a wake for revolution, or whatever; and for all the rest disgraceful bacchanals and crowing till dawn with trumpets.’

I think the barracks was full last night, and that they had a disco, for we never saw a cop, the tanks were locked up in their garden, for I’d tried to get one out. And when the sun came up, we shouted that terrible couplet, and we danced about and even went down to the sea, as though the dawn was some great bomb burst or a burning ship, and there might be survivors, or at least a wreck to loot. But nothing, just another day, and all the dummies with their faces smooth as plates, except for Tonino’s finished off too quick. And so, who had pushed him down was not the one who should have done for him in combat. But we didn’t care, for we all knew that never again would we five sit in our chariot. in the square, five alien gods bringing a load of justice and money, yet linked together by friendship and by fear. Not like the usual run of gods, and protected by my firepower. Like the sun.

‘The bad news,’ says Chiara, ‘is that I have to make your resignat­ion retroactive, to the time we first fired you. Oh Hopper,’ she says expansively, ‘if only you could have found your place with us, reformed your manners and your sensibility. Accepted guidance, forgotten about your friends, not meddled here and there, and stolen things. So many things, I find it hard to credit. You’ve been, dear Hopper, a general pain in the neck.’

I think, ‘The centre is everything, and the truth is secondary,’ and say, ‘So all the truths I rooted out for you?’

‘Were fascinating, my dear.’ She looks at me with longing, but I lick my lips and the sight of my tongue makes her draw back, and she says primly, ‘But without you, there would have been no mystery, and no crimes. You are responsible. Just by being. You cause horrible deaths.’

I say, ‘I wonder what my secret is?’

I hope she will allude to my passion for truth, but she says, ‘Your gullibility. People suspect you because you are so ingenuous. They think you must know some big truth, and so they circle round to tease it out of you.’  

It is an awful revelation, worse than Tonino’s couplet. ‘You mean, people think I know the truth, and kill to find out what it is?’

‘Or kill to stop you telling it ...’ There is a long silence, except that the tin-tin-tin-tin goes on outside the walls.

‘Your quest, your sacred innocence, is the biggest con game there has been. Second only to your friends’, maybe.’

There is silence. ‘Your time here, Hopper, is coming to an end.’ Money, certainly. I think, ‘She’s setting me up, she’s wriggling away.’ Tonino’s death, the wake – it all goes on without a cop in sight – now that, it seems, I’ve never been one.

‘My love,’ she says, ‘so far has saved you. Have you responded? No. Did you respond to Nadia? Never. When fish are cold, it’s best to hurl them back. Into the sea.’ And we both think of that burning sea, set with points of emerald and glass.

I speak urgently to Cecilia. ‘orgies sap cops’ liver’ is her prompt response. ‘It should have been “lives” but the effect seemed better,’ she says. It will suffice to embarrass Chiara, and besides, Cecilia will do much more for me. Tonino, and his message, have set her on the move.

Things are moving fast, and I’m in there pushing them along. It has come time for me to put myself at the centre of the drama. The real Robinson, I decide, is Dr Bhad. I see him early and late, collecting herbs, milking some goats, conjuring up huge hunter’s moons, and lighting the paths of what look like feluccas, carrying what must be materials for his laboratories and experiments, mobilising hundreds to light the fires and mount the signal lights, a castaway with credit cards. And on his face, a fixed, a mirthless smile.

Adnan says, ‘Hopper, we all rely on you. My plans lie here, and Jones has his refuge, and Dr Bhad has plans to make a science park ...’ He talks uncertainly about encouraging a ‘camp of self-sacrifice’ where people will come, or be sent, to serve as guinea pigs.

I say, ‘So, Dr Bhad will end up with his own prison.’

Adnan looks unhappy, and says, ‘Perhaps we could channel in some of Jones’s religious freaks, I don’t want to see my Arabs ...’

It is all a revelation. I say to Adnan, ‘And is this all, is this where all our dreams of autonomy, and truth and resettling the exploited people, Tonino’s hope that socialism would replace the vendetta, Chiara’s attempt to refine criminal sensibilities with volleyball – is this where it ends?’

‘That would make it all very neat and common sense – though certainly it’s Dr Bhad’s talents that are highly prized, much more than mine.’

I cannot resist asking, ‘And than mine?’

He pauses. ‘You were always a dragon, Hopper. Spitting fire, making a roaring noise. That kind of thing. And of course, you’re very good at working with both sides, just slipping in and making friends.’

‘And don’t you think, instead, a great force for – evil, if you believe in it, or at least a catalyst?’ I ask.

‘I don’t think in those terms,’ said Adnan. ‘Ask Jones. He talks like that.’ He continues briskly, and his bodyguards are running to keep up, ‘If every time that something happened, we had to change our values and worry about being wrong, or bad – we’d never have the time to do anything. And besides, you should find a cause more human and less treacherous. With me, it’s architecture and my Arabs. Both, you notice, near the beginning of the alphabet. Gives lots of choice for eventualities.’

But I am so convinced of being evil that I go and seek out Nadia’s lover, and the man, the Bozo soldier, who tripped Tonino down.

He is sitting in the kitchen shelling beans into the pot. I talk to him quietly about Asunción, and though he has not heard of the place, he is disturbed by my story. I develop the theme, not caring about the differences in experience and culture the telling of it reveals. It is not the time for me to apologise, even if it makes the dialogue one-sided. ‘I don’t just want you to be impressed by this gun,’ I say. ‘You must forget that I have been in America. You should think of me, perhaps, as someone from Brazil, and not a moralist that has come to punish you from outer space, and not a Robinson who reproves you for the savagery that may or may not be in your nature, but at all events can easily be taken care of. I am profoundly offended, deeply annoyed with you for removing Nadia, and then Tonino, who were no threat to you. Or if they were, not in the direct, the physical way in which you chose to see it. You took your action,’ and I look round for weighted staves. ‘Only to save your skin, your business and your reputation.’

I run out of things to say: it is the moment for the sentence. The car outside has its engine running. No more nonsense about the getaway.  

He is quite resigned. Almost relieved. Nothing will be asked of him. It is another link, the chain he knows by heart, the chain that binds Monday to Tuesday. And ends in Friday.

I take him out, and we drive fast, up past the woods, where he expects to die, up through the circles of the forts and earthworks, the sets of lights – yellow, beet-red and arsenic green, like sucked wine-gums – that Dr Bhad is using. We shoot past the holiday self-catering cottages, power relay stations, dented with explosive, graffiti to Bozo. Then we are in the sheep, I screech the wheels to make them move. Then I drive where there is no road; the leather sack beside me where the Bozo’s tied is lurching like a belted paunch. There is noise all round, but he himself is silent.

I stop and tip him out, and fire so close to him our ear drums crack. I have no tracer, but in any case, since he can’t see, the effect would all be lost.

Feeling childish, I scoop him back into the car, and we swoop on like Robinson’s troubled ship. There are no roads. There is water, and no boat. There is air, and then there is no air. We climb and fall. We tunnel. There is no way out. There is no access.

We have arrived. Jones calls his house Jonesville, and the castle where the community is – The Settlement.

He is wearing his armourer’s apron, and there are Dobermans and lots of guns. Some flowers he’s gathered for the good doctor. He looks like Dracula, and I ask, ‘Don’t you read anything but Revelations, Jones? A bit tame by now, I should have thought.’ He mumbles about a project for translating it into dialect, ‘or a cartoon’, but I suspect the Polaroids he has of monsters tell him something different. ‘They showed me these – these incredible monsters, that I have Polaroided,’ he waves towards his desk.

I say brusquely, ‘Jones, I’m not interested in that stuff. I have a Friday here. I look to you to keep him for his life sentence.’ ‘He won’t escape,’ Jones adds sadly. ‘There is no access,’ and I conclude, ‘He doesn’t want to. He has done what it was said, and written. Our friends, though they won’t know it, are avenged. And for the record, we have saved a soul, and saved our skins, and nothing can be pinned on us, but – if needs be – everything on him.’

Someone is chanting, ‘Pin everything on Bozo,’ and it could be a mantra or a malediction. I leave the sack with Friday in it, condemned to everlasting precariousness, mixed up well with Jones’s psychoses. ‘Condemned to modernity for life,’ I think with satisfaction, as I race the car back through the lumpy landscape, that could be made of humps of fog or gorse or stage rocks. When I reach the sheep, I let them rub along the car to put the nature back in it. Doing justice suits me, though it resolves nothing, certainly not the truth.

This I have done well. And Chiara asks, ‘Well, was revenge sweet?’

‘It tastes like ears,’ I say.

With Chiara, I never know if I am finished or just starting. To her – that great, that very great policeman – the accusation and the sentence, the suspicion and the proof, all seem the same.

She smiles palely. ‘So, I’ve won, then?’

I make a great effort, thinking of my compromises and my being cheated, seeing my social pretensions undermined, the chattering about crime, and perhaps about religion – I don’t remember, perhaps that was with Jones, and on that other ship, the one that didn’t sink, before I became Robinson, and then stopped being him.

‘Chiara, I think things are breaking down, falling apart, becoming normal and quite manageable. I’m sure Tonino’s couplet will play its part here, that killings with the staves and leather bags will be replaced by something easier, and less disfiguring. I’m sure you can make statistics sink right down, and that a little plaque for Nadia on my volleyball complex will pacify her family, if they ever come. And yet, after the bad patch, the transition – that will come, the time of greed and order.’ I lose my track. ‘After that time, well, first we shall both be dead.’ I pause piously. ‘And then, I think I hear a stirring and a roaring, a splitting and a poking out of ugly heads, not like the Bozo’s, driven by necessity and family life, but of dark, evil, troubled people like myself. A new, a dangerous rumbling. I hear Herzen swelling like a ground-bass.’

I think, that in this renewal we shall perhaps be found again, sitting like waxworks in our armoured car, you put a quarter in the slot, and Adnan grinds the key, the monstrous lookout flaps his arms, and on the roof another figure, grey like a mantis, and tall and stooped under his bandoliers, his gun meant for a tank and scarcely manageable as it yaws and hops at knee-level. All not to move an inch, but what a spectacle. And think of all that money.

Chiara says deliberately, ‘It was a low blow, Hopper, to use the press against me.’ I had forgotten.

She goes on, ‘You are not ready yet for social life. You have your eyes on global things, salvation. You are behind the times, dear Hopper. Now, life is made of sensation, even manipulation.’

She has rapidly slid her arms round me, and now recoils as though I’m a snake and just shed my skin.

‘What the fuck is that?’ she asks.

I say, ‘It’s three crusaders’ mail shirts. Tonino gave me them, they will protect me against knives, and possibly against silver bullets.’

She is perking up already. ‘And are they hot, and heavy, Hopper dear?’

Poor Chiara, I saw Corrado whittling at a bowl that looks like you. But, if between Nadia and me, that was love, then perhaps this is too: the desire and pursuit of the whore, which is called promotion.

Adnan is ready to leave. He says, ‘Dr Bhad is making a fortune in herbs. He’s stripped the north side of the island. It turns out everyone is toxic, their shit is killing all the fish. Tonino would be amused.’

I say, ‘What shall we do about the couplet? The one you thought was Arabic?’

‘I heard him cursing someone’s grandmother, you thought it the great revelation. I say we should forget it.’

‘Adnan, before you leave, I have to tell you not to rely on me too much. It seems I’ve never been in the police. Despite the uniform.’

‘It was a metaphor, Hopper. People of our generation, if we don’t believe in reason or the absurd, what do we have? I’m glad you got yourself fired – you were in danger of being sidestepped there.’

I say, ‘I was running, Adnan.’

He says, ‘What matters is architecture, Hopper. Like my tents. And mirages. Next year I’ll build mirages all over the Seine.’

I say, ‘I thought they were a make of warplane. Perhaps it’s metaphor.’

He says earnestly, ‘You should forget all this – the stuff about love and women. In the desert, we can handle that.’

I say, ‘I shall never forget, you told me all I needed to know about Trotsky. But I had wanted to understand this dialectic of the old and new ...’

Adnan says impatiently, ‘Well, you won’t find any of that in Trotsky. And as for the killing here – think of the desert, think of the feuds there, over there in the Atlas. And think of all the capitalists. Everyone plants his knife where there is most fertility.’

‘I like that, Adnan,’ I say. ‘It could be our motto.’

‘Well,’ says Adnan wisely, almost as a statesman, ‘a burst of machine-gun fire will never abolish chance. We, the five of us, and now Tonino’s gone the four: not that Jones is one of us, and Dr Bhad is something of a crook, and you, dear Hopper, never get things right, but all the same, the five of us stand for something true and impressive. We are pure souls. The others have the dross, the toxic shit.’

‘It seems like it, Adnan. But you, as a minister, you have to deal with all types.’

He waves his hands, and blows out his cheeks like a gourd: ‘If it wasn’t for being able to bully the artists, I should give it up.’

‘What to do?’

‘That, my friend, is where you could help. You know, we are exceptional bandits, and here is just the place—’

‘I know, I know. You’ve second-guessed me. Enough with reason and utopia, peace and police.’

‘Everyone has been saying that for years. But I must wait – I want to build my tent, unfold my mirages, and set out my oases.’

We say farewell. His bodyguards have bartered their windsurfs for staves shod with copper, which they plan to use as carpet-beaters. We have agreed that Jones’s name for the island, or his segment of it, should stand: The Settlement. And as Chiara and Dr Bhad develop their respective spheres, of order and of therapy – leaving to Jones the revelations – it can expand to be The Settlements.

 

* * *

 

Chiara is trying to recruit Cecilia. ‘It’s a haven here, we’re all your sisters, our weapons are the pen, the private journal,’ Chiara says. Cecilia is not impressed – ‘It’s just a barracks: and the tanks?’

The tanks and Darya’s death; for which Thistle is half condemned, half self-condemned. How easy it is, I think, to hand out justice – the truth’s as plentiful as engine oil, the: moving parts of guilt rub smoothly along together.

‘Remember, Hopper. Love!’ Chiara says, but makes no move to stop me.

The Settlement. It rings out like a chief sheep’s bell.

I hear Chiara say, ‘You’re despicable,’ as I leave, but it might be to Cecilia.

Now I am striding out, and striding upward. I have left the tank behind, taking it to show my friends, and say farewell in all the bars. It burns there, far below, in the square where Thistle used to drink, hand out his grave portions; burns with a pure, hard flame.

I stride upwards, a giant making giant strides in a propaganda poster. I move up through Bozo’s army, the first of the concentric circles, making my last tour of inspection as a Robinson. Forgetting my psalm. The Bozo soldiers are pretending to mind their sheep, but I see them too with walkie-talkies, and some are sprinkling gasoline on neighbours’ pastures, while others gather herbs for Doctor Bhad.

I pass the Monster’s Chimney, where the secrets of the world are kept. Above Jonesville there is a mass of prayer flags, and I think I see Jones there, drilling his little army, or maybe rehearsing for a play, or training guard dogs. As I climb, the centres of the Bozos’ power dilute. The strength lies on the rim, here, as I reach the peak, there is nothing, no strongpoint.

Now, at the top, I strip off my Robinson outfit. Under the single pine there are the Babylonian prints of sheep, set hard into the granite – eternal self-census of the livestock. In the distance there’s a liner, scattering the feluccas, which peck    away like doves. It is more peaceful than a cemetery, the pinetree like the central spike of a sundial stuck at noon, pinned in by heat. Softer than the sound of blood, I hear the tin-tin-tin-tin far below. The sea is bright and sharp with points of emerald and glass, and on the liner there may be myself, and Jones, still worried about ginseng and where it’s safe to land. And will there be a Friday to look after us, should we be wrecked? And only one of us would dare to go back for his money, though I remember as a great moment, the thrill of turning those arcs of fire into one blazing circle, ring of fire in which to die and be at once, forever, reconstituted and made fireproof.

I dig down into the sand, and shift aside the quartz. It’s like heavy granulated sugar. There are my crates. My iron rations. Or rather, as I ease them from their cavities, my beautiful things, my valuables. With these: yes, you can last and last.

I’ve never seen so many silver bullets.