Gilgamesh Page 11

  ‘You could always sleep here.’ He gestured at the chaise longue, his eyes suddenly gone black with calculation. ‘Comme tu es charmante,’ he murmured, ‘comme tu es gamine.’

  ‘I don’t speak French,’ Edith said, stepping around him towards the door.

  He turned away abruptly. ‘Madame, if you please.’ He tapped at a map on the wall. Closer she saw it was of Europe and Russia and Asia Minor. With a practised eye she made out the tiny island of Armenia in the ocean of Russian green. All over the map, across Turkey and Persia and the deserts of Mesopotamia, were scattered coloured toothpick flags.

  ‘Oil interests,’ said the old Armenian, with a wave of his hand. ‘Nous sommes ici,’ he said, stabbing at a point north of Greece. ‘Tomorrow afternoon we will reach Istanbul. Tell me, what are you intending to do then?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  ‘Do you have a visa for the Soviet Union? No? And you think they will let you in! They will think you are a spy! Do you know what they do to spies?’ Close up she could see the ring of his teeth, worn concave like an old dog’s. His eyes peered at her, cold as stones. Perhaps he thought she was a spy. He took a card from a little pack in his pocket, held together with a rubber band. ‘Here is the address of a hotel in Istanbul. The Hotel Pariz. Very comfortable, very clean. The courtyard and its birds are quite famous. You would be well taken care of there, and so would your son.’

  ‘I’m afraid I could never afford it,’ said Edith handing it back to him.

  He steered her hand with the card back towards her. ‘Foolish girl!’ Fine specks of saliva flew from his mouth. ‘You would not even have to pay for the taxi that took you there.’ His eyes fixed hers. ‘Listen to me. You do not know where it is you are going. You do not know the nature of those parts of the world. They do not have enough to eat there. Do you know how that feels, Australian girl?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’ So he had seen her passport, the conducteur must have shown it to him.

  ‘A war is coming. All the men will go. You will be trapped. You will grow old there, if you survive. You will become a broken reed. Do you understand? A broken reed.’ He opened the door for her. ‘Keep this card. Believe me, you are going to need some help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Edith gasped, stumbling out. Thank you The servant with the shaven head was waiting outside. He closed the door behind her. Down the long intestine of the train she ran, head bowed, shivering. Jim! Jim! Sherry-red thoughts rose and bloomed in her. She thought of Jim’s round head, his ten white milk teeth, his throaty voice, his simple joys and displeasures. The well-meaningness of their life together. She was desperate for the feel of his arms around her neck. She was running to him as if towards all that was good in life.

  She could hear him screaming as she entered Third Class.

  The Bulgarian man, tousled and unbuttoned, was holding Jim against his shoulder, patting him, his melancholy eyes looking over his head. He handed him over to Edith with an air of a duty discharged. Jim screamed louder as if to let Edith know of his outrage. The newlyweds were sitting upright on their bunks, haggard-faced. Hush, hush, they murmured, frightened of the attention he might attract. They looked at Edith with reproach. Edith was aware of the sherry on her breath. Jim didn’t quieten until she took him into the corridor and showed him the outline of trees and fields in the moonlight and the white gleam of a herd of goats.

  He fell asleep against her, wet and hiccuping, heavy as lead.

  Here and there was a light from a house or shepherd’s fire in the mysterious shelf of distant mountains. Sometimes they passed through a tiny wayside station and she could see the yellow lantern in the stationmaster’s hut as he rushed out to present his flag to the huge foreign express.

  What was her story in the great swirling darkness of the world? The old man in the train could take her life and use it and throw it away. It didn’t matter to him what she was, or what she thought. He could enslave her if he wished to and nobody would care. He had watched her, or had her watched, he was everywhere, he could always find her. She could sense the immensity of his power. There was nobody like him where she came from, not even the richest guests at the Sea House. Such power was everything that her father disapproved of, but what did his values matter in these parts? She had to think as they did here. The struggle now was not just to find Aram, but to stay alive.

  In the early hours of the morning the train stopped briefly at a siding and the Bulgarian man, transformed into a portly businessman in hat and coat, let himself out of the compartment without a backward glance. The train was just sliding off again when the door rumbled open and a new passenger entered, a slight man, hatless, whose springing black hair gave the impression of youth. He saw that Edith was awake and he smiled at her. She glimpsed something black in his mouth.

  In the grey light the newlyweds slept on, hunched into troubled, separate sleep. Jim slept with one hand lying lightly across Edith’s knee, the small king who had exhausted his court.

  The newcomer leant down to Edith. ‘Cigarette?’ He held out a packet, smiling and nodded his head towards the corridor. She eased herself out. She drew on the thick aromatic cigarette that he offered and her head spun and his face blurred. She looked out the window.

  Men and women, working at dawn in the fields by the tracks, straightened up to watch as they passed. ‘The Bulgarian proletariat,’ he said. It was the sort of thing Leopold would say. How did he know she spoke English? He spoke it with ease. There was something familiar about his accent. It was a shock to glimpse his bad teeth, rotten and black like the seeds of a mildewed pumpkin. She drew again on the cigarette.

  ‘There’s an old man in a private car at the back of the train. I think he must be very rich.’

  ‘Oh yes he is rich! Haven’t you heard of him? They call him Mr Five Percent. He makes oil deals for the British and Americans and Russians—maybe the Germans—and he always keeps five per cent for himself.’

  ‘He is Armenian.’

  ‘Yes, the Armenians are very proud of him. They’re always hoping for a patriotic donation. But the only loyalty Mr Five Percent has is the loyalty of the capitalist—to himself.’

  ‘How do you know about him?’

  ‘Because he loves the Orient Express! Each time I travel on it he is travelling too. He has his own special car kept for him. They say that during the Armenian massacres in 1896 he escaped from Istanbul on the Express, dressed as a Turkish peasant with his baby son wrapped up in a carpet!’

  She felt comfortable with him. His eyes were wide apart, deepset, slightly inflamed. A small smile never left his lightly-closed lips. He wore a tight black suit and a knotted scarf of sky-blue Chinese silk. Dandruff sprinkled his narrow shoulders. His hair was parted in the middle and rose in two tufts like horns above his temples. He looked like an artist, a Bohemian.

  ‘Why do you travel on this train?’

  ‘I’m a cloth merchant. I travel around the Black Sea, from Batum to Odessa and Sevastopol.’ He winked. ‘Sometimes I slip across to the Balkans, or down to Istanbul.’

  ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘I’m on my way home, to Armenia.’

  ‘That’s where I’m going! Are you Armenian?’

  He was smiling at her. ‘I was born in Yerevan.’

  ‘How are you travelling there?’

  ‘I take a boat across the Black Sea to Georgia. Train to Tiflis. Then the train over the mountains into Armenia.’ Ronnie’s route.

  His name was Hagop Essayan. He suggested they travel together.

  ‘You speak very good English.’

  ‘I learnt it in my studies in Yerevan and on my travels. But Armenians are quick with languages.’

  The sun rose to reveal soft green woods, rich brown furrows, an old maternal landscape. She and Jim watched Hagop buy some hot meat soup for them in the station at Sofia. He walked with a slight limp. Jim gulped down every last drop of the soup. He waved with Hagop from the window at the Turkish children waving by the
railway line, and pointed as Hagop pointed at the gleam of the passing village minarets. From the day cars came the wailing sound of singing as the Turkish passengers glimpsed the glittering blue of the ocean.

  ‘The Sea of Marmara,’ Hagop said. He was a black-toothed angel. It was as if he had been sent.

  But in Istanbul’s Serketchi Station she lost him. He stood back for her to join the line that bumped its way off the train. On the platform all the passengers became instant strangers, making their own way into the crowd. She was surrounded by porters and moneychangers and beggars, jostling and shouting at her in an unintelligible language. Turkish people, the cruellest people on earth, Aram once said. When she looked around for Hagop, he had disappeared.

  With Jim in one arm and the Globite in the other she pushed her way through the men, eyes blurred, shaking her head. She found them a little shelter next to a great barred archway leading to the sunlit road outside the station. She gripped Jim’s hand and stood there, trying to think. She fought an impulse to crouch down, pillow her head on the Globite and sleep. A sleep from which she would never wake. Through the archway, on the street outside, she saw a line of beggars clustered around the long black nose of a limousine. The shaven-headed valet, arms folded, was leaning on the car, kicking at those who came too close. She pulled her head back behind the archway and tried to breathe.

  When next she peeped around, the limousine was gliding past the archway and she glimpsed the old man’s profile in the back window. A flash of blue appeared in the darkness of the archway. Hagop was coming out of the sunshine back into the station. She hardly had the strength to call him.

  He’d been negotiating for a taxi, he said. He was cheerful, didn’t seem to notice Edith’s distress.

  ‘Did you see old Mr Five Percent?’ she asked.

  ‘Indeed yes. Off to his local harem no doubt.’ Limping, smiling, smoking, he instructed the porters in fluent Turkish as they lowered his large iron-banded trunk from the luggage van.

  It was nearly dusk by the time their taxi set off on its mad hooting way from the station to the port. Hagop told the driver to hurry. A boat was sailing to Batum that night. ‘Istanbul is a wonderful city,’ he said, ‘but no Armenian stays too long here.’ It was only after they had passed them that Edith recognised the newlyweds holding hands at the dusty kerb, about to disappear forever into the teeming crowd.

  At the rail of the deck, Hagop offered her a swig from a tarnished silver flask that he kept in the pocket of his jacket. Armenian brandy, the best in the world, he said. Everything Armenian was best, to the Armenians, Edith thought. The Black Sea was indeed black, and calm as a lake, the white wake curling primly beside them, but the very smell of the cabins and the overcrowded saloon of the sooty old ferry made her familiarly queasy. Hagop said the brandy would settle her stomach. She set up a nest on the deck, between two benches. Jim lay asleep there, beneath Hagop’s blanket. All along the deck were huddled groups of sleeping passengers, children gathered under the shawls of their mothers. A sickle-shaped moon blew out from the dark coast.

  Music started up in the saloon, with no instrument that Edith could recognise, and nothing of what her father used to call ‘a bit of tune’, the melody strange, Oriental, from the unknown countries towards which she was sailing. Hagop lifted his head to listen, his hand beating gently on the rail.

  ‘The doudek. Listen. The long single note. To hold that note is very hard. There must be an Armenian aboard.’

  ‘Do you play the doudek?’

  ‘I used to. I played many instruments. I was a student of music once at the State Conservatorium in Yerevan.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was an explosion in the school. A bomb was thrown. By Armenian nationalists, it was said. I was injured. It affected my leg and my … my nerves. The school was closed for more than a year.’

  He offered Edith more brandy.

  ‘It’s not so bad. My family in Yerevan has always traded in cloth. And after the accident I saw life in a different way. I saw what was my fate. Now I am a cloth merchant who also collects music on his travels.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you would have met a man called Aram Sinanien in Yerevan? A man about your age?’ Edith kept looking at the waves.

  ‘Perhaps I have.’ Hagop screwed up his eyes as if to remember. He didn’t ask her who Aram was. She had told him she was going to Armenia to find her husband. He hadn’t asked her any questions. It was important for him, she thought, as it had been for Aram, to appear detached and never at a loss.

  ‘The man I am talking of is slim, but strongly built, with dark eyes and hair and a nose like—’

  ‘In other words, an Armenian.’

  ‘Yes, but he has only been living in Armenia for the last couple of years.’

  ‘Perhaps he is the same. Who knows?’

  ‘Do you know where to find him?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He threw his cigarette into the water. ‘Do you want to come and listen to the music?’

  ‘I’ll stay with Jim.’ She must be careful, she thought, that out of need she didn’t turn him into her protector. From a friendly, tatty stranger he was becoming someone else to her now. There was a density behind his lightness.

  He went below and she curled up under the blanket next to Jim. Hagop made finding Aram seem possible.

  I am coming to you. Wait for me.

  In the morning they woke cold, wet with salt dew. The Black Sea was grey and heaved in a temperamental swell. Her head ached, she felt nauseated. Jim’s nappy was so sodden that she threw it over the railing. Jim crowed as he watched Irina’s unravelling flannel sink beneath the waves.

  It wasn’t until the coastline of Georgia appeared that Edith told Hagop she had no visa. He said nothing but walked off up the deck, smoking. She wondered if he would disappear again. But he returned as the boat was drawing close to Batum and all the passengers were milling around on the deck. He pulled a black headscarf from his pocket and handed it to her.

  ‘Perhaps if you wear this it would be better.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You will look less different.’

  ‘Is it going to be difficult?’

  ‘Who knows?’ He shrugged and lit another cigarette.

  The headscarf was ample, of soft black woven cotton. It swathed Edith’s forehead and shoulders. In the salt-smeared window of the saloon she caught sight of herself and Jim. They looked dwarf-like and lost, like a snapshot of somebody’s children.

  The passengers passed straight from the ship into a huge vaulted waiting room without benches or chairs. At the back of the room at high desks sat three soldiers in olive-green uniforms, with red stars on the epaulettes. They were dark, with moustaches and square high-boned faces, as if they were all relatives of Mr Stalin. They worked calmly, unsmiling, turning pages of passports, slowly applying their rubber stamps. Before them, families with bundles and crates and screaming babies squatted in groups on the floor. How at ease they seemed sitting in a circle, as if wherever they went they made a home. Some were veiled women from Azerbaijan, with only their eyes showing, like black ghosts. Blacksuited Levantine merchants, bearded Russian Jewish traders, Polish and Lithuanian commercial travellers sat smoking on their trunks and sample boxes. At the doorway guards stood smoking, with ammunition belts strung across their olive-green fronts.

  It was late afternoon by the time Edith uncoiled her stiff legs from the floor and stumbled with Jim to a desk. Hagop stood behind her, to translate. The Customs official turned her thin black passport over and over and hailed a comrade. They spoke to her and she didn’t understand.

  The kangaroo and emu on her passport looked as innocent as a nursery frieze.

  Hagop spoke rapidly to the soldiers. More of them crowded round. Telephone calls were made. The soldiers looked worried. Hagop was still talking. She was shown with Jim into a little room, and the door was locked. There was nothing in the room but a table and two chairs and on the wall an old-fashioned wind-
up telephone. In the high barred window the night rolled down. Jim ran round and round the room and climbed on the desk. She had no energy to keep him entertained. Another official came in, older, heavy-lidded, harassed-looking, who spoke a little English. She tried to explain her case.

  ‘So the reason for your visit is sentimental.’ He shook his head. ‘This is hard to believe.’

  ‘I am not sentimental,’ said Edith. ‘I am looking for the father of my son.’

  The man stared at her. ‘But that is not important. Personal histories are not important,’ he said. Jim started to scream. The official shook his head and left the room.

  Nothing consoled Jim. There was no water or food. He was soaking wet, but they had taken away the Globite. His little hoarse voice reverberated against the walls. He beat his hands on the door. He slumped, whimpering, and they both fell asleep on the floor. This was what happened to spies.

  She was shaken awake by Hagop. ‘Edith, come on.’ There was a faint light in the room, it must be dawn. The older official was with him and he handed Edith her passport.

  ‘Here is your visa,’ he said. ‘You are very lucky. Comrade Stalin loves little children.’ He shook his head at her and left the room slamming the door.

  ‘We can go,’ Hagop said. His face was shadowed with stubble and weariness. He didn’t smile. How long had he been speaking on her account? What had he said? She had no doubt that it was Hagop who had saved them. Why had he done this for them? He was indeed a friend.

  ‘Hagop, how long is the visa for?’

  ‘Do not worry. Once we are in Armenia, all can be arranged.’

  There was a guard outside the door, smoking. He looked away as they left. The huge waiting hall was empty. The port was deserted. A solitary taxi slid over to them. Hagop’s trunk was strapped to its roof.

  ‘What did you say to them?’ Edith whispered, but he shook his head. They all squeezed into the back next to the Globite, which had magically reappeared.

  ‘I can’t believe it. I’m going to Armenia!’