Gilgamesh Read online

  ‘You know how untidy Leopold is,’ Irina said. ‘But before he left he burned all his papers and packed away his books.’ She stood looking round the room shaking her head. ‘He wouldn’t even tell me, his mother, where he was going.’

  Take your life in your hands. He would have written that letter at this desk.

  In his bed at night Edith pondered the puzzle of Leopold. The room with its bareness, its high bed, the vista of rooftops from its one long window, seemed to speak of him, show her something about him that she hadn’t seen before. Something detached, airy, austere. It comforted her. Something was finished in this room, in eternal readiness for departure.

  The more she thought of Leopold, the less she could recall Aram, or, rather, Aram and Leopold were blending into one person. In this bed she was peaceful, as if she lay in Leopold’s arms. It made her gentler with Jim.

  Each afternoon, Edith watched Irina’s speared hat and pouter chest and hurrying pointed shoes disappear down the street. She went downstairs into the tiny paved backyard and brought in Jim’s nappies, damp, stained, threadbare squares. She hung them to dry in front of the fire, a sight Irina abhorred. She fed Jim a generous lunch in the kitchen and put him to bed. Then she went into Irina’s room and looked in her cupboards and drawers. She found what she wanted in her writing-case: the secret address to which Irina sent her letters to Leopold. Was it so secret, or had Irina not offered it because she wanted to keep Leopold to herself? It was a post-office box number in London. She also took an envelope and stamp from the writing case and enclosed the letter she had written, asking Leopold if he had news of Aram. She told him she was going to Armenia and would send him her address from there. Shyly, she added that she was travelling with her little boy, and that she hoped Leopold would have a chance to meet him. She slipped out of the house and posted the letter into the red pillar-box on the corner. She returned to stand by the bay window and smoke one of Irina’s exotic black cigarettes.

  Was she up to her old tricks? she asked herself. Once a thief always a thief? There were some coins, threepences and pennies lying in a white china bowl on the dressing table, but she refused even to look at them. Irina had been so kind. She was having an old coat of hers altered by her dressmaker to fit Edith. She kissed Jim on the cheek morning and night, like a proper great-aunt. Their evenings together by the fire were very cosy. Irina said how glad she was to have Edith there, now that she was a lonely old woman whose son had left her.

  But her attacks on Edith’s plans were relentless. Every evening she asked Edith the same question: Have you given up your silly ideas yet? Edith shook her head. Then Irina said Edith didn’t know how cold a northern winter could be. How the Caucasus was filled with brigands. How there were terrible spies and police in Russia. What life was like under the Communists. How this amounted to murder of her child. She fell into a bitter silence. Thwarted, her handsome face was sharp, almost vicious.

  Some afternoons Edith took Jim into London, on errands for the journey. She was nervous as they queued for the bus, nervous of the crowds, but she told herself she must get used to this. A shoemaker resoled her shoes and on his shelves she caught sight of a little pair of leather boots, mended but unclaimed. She bought them though they were at least two sizes too big for Jim. But he was going to have to walk. She bought herself a square-folded map, of Europe and the Middle East. She went to Victoria Station and enquired about the price of a third-class ticket on the Orient Express. It cost as much as the boat trip from Australia. She would be lucky to arrive in Istanbul with ten pounds.

  As she grew tired the streets of London dispirited her. Behind the squares and parks, the regal rows of houses, the early spring beds of daffodils, were crowded lanes with overflowing gutters, ragged women and pale stunted children, sooty pavements, starving dogs. Jim was frightened and had to be carried. Once they passed three grubby brothers, the eldest held a baby boy who was laughing as the middle brother reached up to tickle him. Jim at least was clean and warmly dressed in Lavinia’s stolen coat, and well-fed, thanks to Irina, but he had never known such adoration. They were strangers, and alone.

  Everywhere the billboards shouted War. Germany had swallowed up Czechoslovakia. She shivered as she passed the steps leading down to the Tube, remembering the dream of her father disappearing into the underground. Beggars huddled on the steps beneath dirty blankets. She hurried on home to the fire, thinking of their blank, blinking faces. It was as if they waited at the gates of hell. Without family, this is what could happen to you.

  She would have to leave soon before she lost her nerve.

  ‘You are going for love,’ Irina said. ‘Love! People die, not for love, but for hate where you are going. Do you know how many Jews are trying to get into England at the moment? You are leaving a sanctuary to go into the heart of a maelstrom. Love is a luxury. To die for love is a romantic luxury in the modern world.’

  ‘I’m not going to die,’ said Edith, ‘and neither is Jim.’

  ‘You know, Edith,’ said Irina softly, deadly, ‘no good ever came of chasing a man.’

  ‘Aram didn’t run away. He doesn’t know about Jim.’

  Irina cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘Well, he should have, Edith.’

  A hot wave ran over Edith.

  ‘You’ll end up in the brothels of Europe.’ Irina’s face subsided into bitterness. She leaned back as if this was her final word.

  The next afternoon while Jim was sleeping, Edith removed a soft white flannel sheet from the bottom of the pile in Irina’s cupboard, and with the scissors from Irina’s work basket cut the sheet into squares. She was grim and workmanlike about it. Irina had many sheets, she would not miss it. She swept up the threads and put Jim’s new nappies into the bottom of the Globite suitcase. The scissors were inviting. She looked at her face in the mirror over the fireplace. She picked up her long thick plait and chopped it off at the nape of her neck. It felt like an execution. She stood holding up her plait, thick as her forearm. But the mirror told her she had not been instantly transformed into a woman of fashion. Her hair hung limp and jagged around her neck. She threw the plait into the fire where it coiled and sizzled like something alive. The room filled with acrid smoke. She ran into the bedroom clutching her head, and threw herself down beside Jim. Regret, and fear as Sampson must have felt, was so sharp she could hardly breathe. Jim woke and looked at her curiously, reached across to pat her rough head. Edith made herself look again in the mirror. There was no getting past it, she looked like a mad girl, or a fever patient. And this was no way for a woman to face the world.

  One morning Edith ran a deep bath for the two of them. She folded their towels, smoothed the eiderdown over Leopold’s bed and made them each a large bowl of porridge. They ate it slowly, looking out the window at a sparrow nesting in a tree. She packed a parcel of bread and margarine in brown paper and filled Jim’s bottle. Then, determined not to steal away this time, she woke her aunt to say goodbye.

  Edith’s new coat, grey flannel with fitted waist and wide cape collar was the most beautiful coat she had ever seen. She didn’t know that emerging from it, her black-stockinged legs and newly bare neck looked pathetically long and thin. Bits of her hair stuck out from beneath a pulled-down beret. She stood in the hall next to her old brown Globite, holding Jim by the hand. He was very pleased with his shoes, though the toes stuffed with paper made him trip when he ran. Pushkin sneaked across the floor, but Jim stayed by Edith. She had told him he was going on a train and must be good.

  Irina had turned old. Her face fell into formlessness, her eyes were watery and blurred. Her dressing gown was shabby, and her white hair hung thin down her back.

  ‘If only Leopold were here. He would never let you go.’

  ‘You did your very best to stop us.’ Edith put her hand gently on Irina’s shoulder.

  Irina’s face crumpled up. ‘I feel something terrible is going to happen to the world. I wish he would come home.’ She clutched her neck. ‘I have something f
or you. Wait.’ She hurried back into her bedroom. A chair scraped, a key turned. She came out and placed an envelope in Edith’s hands. On the outside in shaky black script was written The gods love those who are brave. Inside the envelope was fifty pounds.

  ‘It would have come to you one day,’ Irina said. ‘It is your mother’s gift.’ She looked shy and pleased, in spite of herself.

  Edith wished she had time to love Irina. Just for a moment, she contemplated the pleasures of being a devoted niece, a virtuous daughter, a loyal sister. Living out her days in the shelter of approval. She felt a pang now about cutting up Irina’s sheet. She had broken her own resolution to be honest and it weakened her. She would have liked to tell Irina and ask for her pardon. But then perhaps she might never leave.

  Too late! There was no putting the sheet back.

  But there was something else, she thought, as she and Jim turned to wave to Irina from the front gate. Something that made setting off down the street to the bus stop feel like a relief. Her mother had always tried to please Irina. Edith had grown up knowing this, thousands of miles away. Irina was one of those women, like Frances and Madge and Matron Linley, who wanted you to do what they wanted you to do. Who made you feel you had to agree with them. Perhaps in the end her mother had made her journey to escape Irina. Perhaps Leopold had.

  None of the passengers in Edith’s compartment could afford to eat in the dining car. Three times a day when the restaurant man came rushing down the corridor ringing his bell and shouting Premier Service! they pulled out crumpled packages of bread and cheese and sausage, and munched glumly, looking out the window. The Bulgarian man at the other end of the seat offered Edith some olives and a piece of flat bread that looked like damper, but she refused. She did not like to think that he had noticed her meagre rations and pitied her.

  In the station in Milan, Edith bargained English pennies for a bag of soft white rolls from a bread-seller on the platform. The magnificent train, with its shining blue and gold carriages marked Paris—Athénes, Paris—Bucharest, Paris—Stamboul, gave a burst of steam and Jim, terrified like her that it would leave without them, screamed and struggled to run towards the carriage steps.

  Pazienza, pazienza, Signor, said the bread-seller softly to Jim. Edith paid sixpence for the rolls though she knew it was far too much. As she helped Jim mount the train, she had the strange sensation, as she had had in Victoria Station and the Gare de Lyon, of being watched.

  She felt it again on the platform at Belgrade as she tried to buy some tea from a ragged, fast-handed vendor who refused her coins. She walked Jim off down the platform, trying to disappear among the drab officials and rush of local passengers in their headscarfs and felt hats as they clambered onto the day cars with their bundles and pots and chickens in a cage. Pazienza, pazienza, she muttered, to calm herself. Hadn’t Ronnie Tehoe once said that travel was a game, a puzzle that piece by piece fell into place?

  On the first morning, with fatherly resignation, the Bulgarian man had relinquished his window seat to Jim who was wailing and straining to put his face against the glass. He was a fleshy family man—four sons, he showed Edith on his fingers—with sad brown eyes and slow deliberate movements: he did not smile once during the journey but sat slumped in sombre thought, or slept, his stomach sadly gurgling, a handkerchief over his face.

  Nobody spoke. The couple on the opposite seat sat smiling as they watched everything Jim did. When he was fresh from sleep he jigged and crowed for them and they laughed and looked at one another. They each wore a shining gold wedding band and they longed to have a child. Edith knew this, as she knew that she in turn longed for the intimacy they shared. They had boarded in Paris but the language that they whispered together did not sound like French. The bride had grey streaks in the long curls of her hair and her shy dark eyes easily filled with tears. When she slept her husband kept his arm around her soft sloping shoulder. His face was worn, faintly pitted and a pulse seemed to beat above his jaw. As they approached a border he woke her and they held hands. But the conducteur of each carriage kept the passengers’ passports and the Orient Express crossed all frontiers without hindrance from border guards.

  As night fell they all studied their reflections in the black mirror of the windows. Edith saw that none of them was happy, each of them was worried and afraid. Stark haunted faces stared back at them until the conducteur came in and pulled down their beds. The men took the top bunks. Edith could hear the Bulgarian man making discreet adjustments to his clothing above her. The couple, like her, slept fully dressed. Jim lay wedged next to the window, sucking on his bottle, keeping his eyes on Edith, who was still sitting up. After he fell asleep she would let herself out into the corridor and have a cigarette by herself.

  He had just closed his eyes when the compartment door discreetly rumbled open and the conducteur in his blue and gold uniform bowed from the corridor towards Edith. He beckoned her with his white gloved finger. ‘Madame,’ he whispered, ‘if you please.’

  Edith eased herself from her bunk and tiptoed out, closing the door. The conducteur did not speak but set off quickly down the length of the train. Her hands spurted perspiration, her knees went weak. Afterwards she would ask herself why she had been so obedient, left her child like that, left the precious Globite, why she had been so afraid. It was guilt of course, night and day guilt lay in wait for her, made her expect a reckoning at every border.

  At the very end of the train the conducteur tapped on a door which slid open at once and with a brisk, paternal pat, he pushed Edith inside. She was in a dim private car lit by shaded lamps. A manservant whose shaven head gleamed in the shadows, slid the door closed behind her and led her towards a large desk. An old man was seated there, writing. He looked up as Edith approached. He stood, flicked his hand to dismiss the manservant, bowed his head.

  ‘Mademoiselle, thank you for coming. Please, take a seat.’ His voice was soft, rather high-pitched.

  The room was like a salon in a hotel, not a compartment in a train. It was as big as three compartments, with the desk in the middle of the room and at the far end a leather chaise longue. The windows were hung with heavy velvet drapes and Oriental rugs covered the floor. There were bronze lampstands with lights softly glowing behind parchment shades. Embroidered cloths looped across the walls and a parrot pretended to be asleep in a hanging cage.

  ‘Mademoiselle, will you join me in a glass of sherry?’

  He did not seem to expect an answer from Edith, but, smiling as he moved to a small cabinet, filled two crystal goblets and set them down on the desk. He sat again, facing her. ‘Cigarette?’ He pushed an open wooden box towards her. ‘I do not smoke myself, but you I think, do like to partake.’ He smiled again to himself. Edith shook her head.

  The man was wearing a silk dressing-gown the colour of liver, with a yellow cravat around his neck and trouser cuffs showing beneath. This was how she supposed an English aristocrat to dress, but he wasn’t English. She didn’t know what he was, except that he was very rich. He was stocky and cleanshaven with a high domed bald head. Each eyebrow was like a tangled moustache glued above his sharp grey stare. Those eyes, ringed in old dark skin, seemed to her to be the room’s real source of light. With his aquiline nose and thin firm mouth, he was like an old owl, who can see in the dark, who comes out to hunt at night.

  ‘Mademoiselle, do not be afraid. I simply want a little company. It is a long tiring journey, is it not?’

  Edith nodded.

  ‘Mademoiselle, forgive my curiosity! I saw you embark at the very beginning of our journey in London. Please, tell me about yourself. Why are you travelling with your little brother?’

  ‘He’s not my brother, he’s my son. We’re on our way to join my husband.’

  ‘And where may I ask is your destination?’

  ‘Armenia.’

  ‘Armenia! Your husband is Armenian?’ He raised his great tufted eyebrows, delighted to be surprised. ‘I too am a member of that ancient, ingeniou
s but accursed race. Born in Constantinople. For many years my headquarters have been London and Paris, but I still do business in Turkey.’

  ‘Isn’t it dangerous for an Armenian to go to Turkey?’

  ‘My situation is such,’ he said, amused, ‘that I am welcome everywhere.’

  Edith took a sip of the sherry, which was sweet and delicious.

  ‘Tell me, why has this Armenian husband of yours allowed you to make such a long dangerous journey with his son?’

  ‘It was unavoidable,’ Edith said firmly. ‘He is waiting for us.’

  ‘But you have had to come such a long way!’ How much did this old man know about her? ‘May I ask, what is your husband’s name?’

  ‘Aram Sinanien.’ It felt dangerous to say it, as if she were betraying him.

  ‘Turkish Armenian. Not an uncommon name.’ For two or three minutes he sat back and tapped his right palm on the dome of his bald head.

  ‘My dear, do you know the old Turkish proverb: In the fight between a Woman and the World, Allah will always back the World?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pity. Or another: The Cage goes in search of the Bird? Eh, Polly?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My dear, you are ignorant, but brave. Your soul is Armenian! Eh? Will you have dinner with me?’

  ‘No thank you,’ Edith said, rising from her chair. ‘I must go back to my son. He might be awake.’

  ‘Someone can look after him. That can be arranged.’

  ‘Oh no, he would be terribly frightened. He never stays with anyone but me. In fact I must go at once. He’ll scream if he wakes.’ She stood and, out of politeness, drained her glass of sherry.

  ‘I understand,’ said the old man, rising and coming around his desk to pull back her chair. ‘You need time to consider.’

  ‘I’m very tired.’ She heard her voice, high, flat-vowelled, Australian, as she edged towards the door.