Moon Tiger (11 page)

I’ve grown old with the century; there’s not much left of either of us. The century of war. All history, of course, is the history of wars, but this hundred years has excelled itself. How many million shot, maimed, burned, frozen, starved, drowned? God only knows. I trust He does; He should have kept a record, if only for His own purposes. I’ve been on the fringes of two wars; I shan’t see the next. The first preoccupied me not at all; this thing called War summoned Father and took him away for ever. I saw it as some inevitable climatic effect: thunderstorm or blizzard. The second lapped me up but spat me out intact. Technically intact. I have seen war; in that sense I have been present at wars, I have heard bombs and guns and observed their effects. And yet what I know of war seems most vivid in the head; when I lie awake at night and shudder it is not experience but knowledge that churns in the mind. There, but for the whim of God, went I – along with all those other millions casually wiped out: on the Somme, in France, Germany, Spain, the Balkans, Libya, Russia. In Russia… above all in Russia. That is where Sasha should have died respectably amid history, instead of coughing himself away with bronchitis and emphysema in a Monte Carlo nursing home. He should have been a statistic, and then one could have responded to him. He should have been a part of those figures that freeze the blood: the million dead of Leningrad, the three million
labour slaves from Belorussia and the Ukraine, the two million prisoners of Kiev, the quarter million maimed by frostbite, the twenty million give or take the odd man, woman or child who were simply no longer citizens of Russia or indeed of anywhere by 1945. Sasha should have been an old man in Smolensk or Minsk or Viazma or Gzhatsk or Rzhev, dying slowly in the frozen landscape while his home lay in rubble and the German hordes swept onwards. He should have been that bent rag-clad figure with a box on its back that shuffles through the lunar landscape of blitzed Murmansk in 1942, in a photograph I once saw; he should have been that other eternally surviving anonymous grey face, crouched over the shot bodies of wife and daughter in Smolensk or Minsk or Viazma or Gzhatsk or Rzhev.

It is in these words that reality survives. The snow, the twenty degrees below zero temperatures of the winter of 1941; the Russian prisoners herded into open-air pens and left till they died of either cold or starvation; the furnace of Stalingrad; the thirty destroyed cities, the seven million slaughtered horses, the seventeen million cattle, the twenty million pigs. And beyond the words the images: the skeletal buildings pared by fire to chimney stacks and naked walls; the bodies chewed by frost; the screaming faces of wounded men. This is the record; this is what history comes down to in the end; this is the language of war.

Not that other language – that lunatic language that lays a smokescreen of fantasy – that crazy language of generals and politicians: Plan Barbarossa, with its Wagnerian invocations; Operations Snowdrop, Hyacinth, Daffodil and Tulip dancing feyly towards Tobruk. That was the language I used to hear in Cairo, on the lips of the Eighth Army buccaneers – the laconic chat about Matildas and Honeys, coy disguise for several tons of mobile death-dealing metal, and the amiable euphemism whereby such things when hit did not explode (roasting alive their crew) but ‘brewed up’. And it was a picnic, too, of course, and men did not die but bought it, were not shot but stopped one. The eccentricity of it occurs only with hindsight; at the
time it seemed normal, even acceptable. Words were my business, but it wasn’t the moment for close analysis of their implications – or at least not that kind of analysis. Communiqués from GHQ… briefings from the Press Officer… my own reports banged out on the portable Imperial that I still have. Those were the words I dealt in – a language that seems fossilised now, superseded by new jargons, new camouflages. I have lived since in the world of overkill and second strike and negative capability; the scenarios of future wars or probably the final war are preceded by their distracting code-words. Speech regenerates itself like the landscape; words die and others are born, just as buildings melt away and others take their place, as the sand blew over the carcasses of the Matildas and the Honeys and the Crusaders.

I have seen Cairo since the war years and that time seemed to shimmer as a mirage over the present. The Hiltons and the Sheratons were real enough, the teeming jerry-built dun-coloured traffic-ridden deafening city, but in my head was that other potent place, conjured up by the smell of dung and paraffin, the felt-shod tittuping sound of a donkey’s hooves, kites floating in a Wedgwood blue sky, the baroque gaiety of Arabic script.

The place didn’t look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

The terrace at Shepheard’s is packed. There is not a table free, and round each table crowd three, four, five chairs, each its own society; the noise is an orchestration of languages. The suffragis with their trays of drinks weave their way between the tables and Claudia stalks among them. Taking her time,
ignoring the blandishments of a pair of tipsy South Africans, the stare of a Free French officer, invitations to join a friend here, a group of acquaintances there. She knows many of these people; the rest are defined for her by dress and speech. Each one wears the regalia of occupation, race and creed.

This is medieval, she thinks – why did I never think of that before? She notes the gold insignia encrusting the sleeve of a naval officer, the red-banded hat dumped by a brigadier on his knee, the conferring red fezzes at another table. This is a bang-up-to-date nineteen-forty-one medieval urban scene; a structured world in which you can see who everyone is. Those are two Sephardic Jewish ladies and that is a Sikh officer and there is a tribe of three from the home counties. That man knows how to fly an aeroplane and that one is trained to command tanks and that girl knows how to dress a wound. And over there if I am not mistaken is this chap who might wangle me a ride up to the front if I play it right.

She smiles – the glossy lipsticked smile of the times. She approaches his table – a neat figure in white linen, bright coppery hair, high-heeled red sandals, bare sunburned legs – and he rises, pulls out a chair, clicks his fingers at the suffragi.

And looks appreciatively at the legs, the hair, the outfit which is not the get-up of the average woman press correspondent.

At least it is to be assumed that that is what he was doing since he tried later to get me into bed, as the price for a place in a transport plane going up to the desert next day. I didn’t pay the price – or not quite – but I got the seat. I’ve no idea now what his name was; I see, vaguely, a ginger moustache and that dark brown leathery face they all had. He is neither here nor there – just some Ordnance chap who had clout when it came to transport – except that he is one of those vital hinges, the factor without which I would not have gone to Cyrenaica, would not have been in a truck that broke down, would not have been rescued from the middle of nowhere by two officers in a jeep one of whom…

Would not have sat in transcendent happiness on the terrace of the Winter Palace at Luxor, nor lain in misery in a hospital bed in Gezira, would not in short have become what I am. Not even the most maverick historian – myself, perhaps – would deny that the past rests upon certain central and indisputable facts. So does life; it has its core, its centre.

We reach, now, this core.

I arrived in Egypt alone in 1940; I was alone when I left in 1944. When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head – no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine – ours – is the only evidence.

The only private evidence, that is. So far as public matters go – history – there is plenty. Most of it is in print now; all those accounts of which general comes out of it best, who had how many tanks, who advanced where at which point and why. I’ve read them all; they seem to have little to do with anything I remember. From time to time I quarrel with a fact – a name or a date; mostly they just don’t seem relevant. Which of course is an odd comment from one who has written that kind of book herself. I was interested enough in relevance at the time – I had to get a story to file. If I didn’t pursue events and find out what was going on and get myself in a position to witness what was going on if possible I had no story to file. A tart cable from London would have ended my justification for being in the Middle East. But none of that seems important; it has melted away like the language of then or like the baroque balconied buildings of old Cairo supplanted by office blocks and skyscrapers for tourists.

Gordon had said I would never make it as a war correspondent. All the more reason, of course, why I had to. As he pointed out, I was not, on the face of it, qualified. I had to push as I’d never pushed before. I pulled every string I knew of, trailed around to see everyone I’d ever known who might be able to help, and eventually got myself taken on as stringer for a Sunday newspaper and correspondent for one of the
weeklies. I had to fight for it, and neither of them would pay me enough. I dipped into capital – the nest-egg I had from a grandmother – to have enough to live on in Cairo. And I was always on sufferance – both with the editors back in London and with my male colleagues in the Press Corps. I was as good as my last despatch. But the despatches were good. Of course, I made a point of sending them to Gordon; to say – see, I told you so… They used to reach him months late, training on some Scottish moor and then afterwards out in India and he used to write back, also months later, as though one were carrying on a conversation with a time-lag, correcting what he considered infelicities of style. We continued to quarrel – amiably enough – across continents. I didn’t see him for over four years and by the time I did we had both been jolted into another incarnation of ourselves. We met on a platform at Victoria and he said, ‘Christ! You’ve had your hair dyed! I had no idea it was so red. I’d been thinking of it as a sort of brown colour.’ We didn’t kiss; we stood there staring at each other. I said, ‘Why have you got that mark on your cheek?’ ‘I had some disgusting skin disease in Delhi. My war wound. Where are yours?’ I didn’t answer.

Gordon was in Intelligence. Naturally. He spent most of his war in an office with occasional sorties to more insalubrious places. We both told each other what we saw fit about those years. Once Gordon said, ‘I ran across a bloke who knew you in Egypt. He remembers meeting you in a hotel in Luxor. He had a drink with you and some uniformed boyfriend of yours.’ I said, ‘That would have been the Winter Palace, I imagine.’ ‘Who was the boyfriend?’ ‘There were two or three hundred thousand members of the armed forces stationed in and around Cairo at that point,’ I said. ‘You can take your pick.’

It certainly was the Winter Palace. I don’t think there were any other hotels. We arrived off the night train from Cairo in which all the sleepers had been booked so we had to sit up through the hot trundling night squashed thigh to thigh sharing a compartment with a bunch of nurses on leave from the military hospital in Heliopolis and a padre who kept trying to
get up a game of whist. Eventually they all went to sleep and when the dawn came up – that translucent glowing desert dawn – we were the only ones awake and we watched the line of hills on the far side of the Nile go from pink to amber and the water turn sapphire blue. There were flights of white egrets and herons sitting hunched on the trees that overhung the bank and a black ibis posed like a sculpture on a sandbank. The fields in the cultivated mile or so between the river and the desert were bright with green clover or tall thick sugar-cane and they hummed with life – bare-legged fellaheen with their galabiehs looped up between their thighs, little figures of children in brilliant dresses – vermilion and crimson and lime – strings of camels and donkeys and buffalo. And the whole place seemed to be gently shifting – the grey-green feathery palms with their curving snakeskin trunks swaying and waving in the light desert wind. We sat holding hands and staring out of the window and it was like looking at a picture. A Breughel perhaps – one of those busy informative paintings full of detail, of people doing particular things, of a dog cocking a leg, a cat sitting in the sun, a child playing, those pictures where you feel you look into a frozen moment of time. I said that one of the things one never did was notice this place. See it for itself. For us it was nothing but a backdrop. ‘It’s a beautiful country,’ I said. ‘And we don’t see it.’

And he said, ‘We shall always see it.’

We got to Luxor and fought our way out of the station through the dragomen and the sellers of scarabs and black basilisk heads of Rameses the Second and flywhisks and each other’s sisters and got a room at the Winter Palace. We went to bed and stayed there till the late afternoon. We lay naked on the bed with the midday sun slicing in stripes through the shutters; we made love more times than I would have thought possible. He had five days’ leave. The first I had known of it was his voice on the phone asking if I could get away for a long weekend. He had been up at the front and he’d be going back there next week. Or to wherever the front by then was – that indeterminate confusion of minefields and dispositions of
vehicles in the empty neutral sand. He once described it to me as more like a war fought at sea than on land, a sequence of advances and retreats in which the participants related only to each other and barely at all to the landscape across which they moved. A war in which there was nothing to get in the way – no towns, no villages, no people – and nothing tangible to gain or lose. In which you fought for possession of a barely detectable rocky ridge, or a map position. In which there were suddenly hundreds of thousands of men where there had been nothing, but still the place remained empty. He spoke of the desert as being like the board in some game in which opposing sides manoeuvred from square to square; I used the image in a despatch and got a pat on the back from London office and told him I should have given him a credit. He said he’d wait for that till after the war.