Submergence (20 page)

Between them, over the course of the evening, they ate servings of duck foie gras with a peach wine jelly, Scottish scallops, ham, deboned saddle of lamb from the Auvergne, white beans with truffles, sea bream,
poached apricots, bay leaf panacotta, cheeses and chocolates. They drank champagne, a house white wine, Rothschild Bordeaux, Chateau Villefranche dessert wine; he an espresso and she a cup of rooibos tea. There were also almonds and Christmas pudding with brandy sauce from the Ritz in London.

He wore a blue suit with suede shoes and a grey Turnbull & Asser shirt. He had only his regimental cufflinks with him. A silver parachute on maroon. He did not think she would notice.

He was in many ways old-fashioned. He envied Victorian explorers for having such obvious goals and for the contrast they experienced between the world they discovered and the world they returned to. Nothing was that clearly defined any more. He did not trust emotions. He trusted knowledge and duty. Yes, duty. His work was only occasionally terrifying. When it was he dealt with it. His mind was supple, the mind of a future head of intelligence, who believed the greatest service he could offer in the complicated present was to help people catch up emotionally with where they stood historically. They were almost exactly coeval.

‘You were in the army,’ she said.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Just about everything. Those cufflinks for a start. The tattoo. I’ve never met a man who folds his clothes and arranges his shoes before getting into bed.’

‘It was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘A short service commission.’

‘You sound like you regret it.’

‘In some ways.’

‘You jumped out of planes?’

‘Yes, I jumped.’

‘Wow!’ she said, echoing his wow. She wasn’t French, not really. Of course she saw his cufflinks, of course she saw through him. It would be only a little while before the nature of his spying was similarly evident; the lies, thefts, deaths; the despots of the agency, the good men and women who were prevented from getting out.

She did not ask him what it was like to jump out of a plane, she did not say: what was it about the army you didn’t like? She said, ‘Can I say something in German? Would you mind?’

‘Not at all,’ he said. Then, ‘I don’t speak German.’

‘Just listen to the words.’

She spoke them slowly and clearly:

‘
Durch den sich Vögel werfen, ist nicht der vertraute Raum, der die Gestalt dir steigert
.’

‘Something about a bird.’

‘It’s Rilke. What birds plunge through is not the inner space in which you see all forms intensified. I thought it might mean something to a paratrooper.’

He was noncommittal. ‘I haven’t jumped in years.’

They talked about supermodels, punk, and the King’s Road.

She talked about her nephew, Bertrand, Bert.

There was so much they could not talk about. She could not simplify the maths for him. He was legally bound to hide behind a false identity. They talked cheerfully of Christmas things and listened to the madrigals and only when the meats arrived, the waiters hastening like star-led wizards with odours sweet, did she ask him about Africa.

‘Tell me about French Africa.’

‘Djibouti,’ he answered, without thinking.

‘Where’s Djibouti?’

‘Between Eritrea and Somaliland.’

She nodded.

‘It looks the way lots of places are going to look. The capital is Djibouti Ville. It’s dilapidated. The main square has been renamed, but everyone still calls it by its colonial name. The speakeasies where the French legionnaires drink are sandbagged against suicide bomb attacks, although the prostitutes show off their wares all the same. The shops directly off the main square are run by Chinese traders. The presidential helicopter flies low over the market stalls in the evenings.
Everyone has a mobile phone with a camera and music player built in. Many of the Djiboutian men forget to turn them off when they enter into the mosque, so the prayers are interrupted by a mix of ring tones, some of them religious, more often theme tunes, or French hip-hop. The camels are driven in from the desert in the early evening to be butchered and you can sometimes see the Afaris hacking away at the camel hump then gathering around to drink from the green mess there, just as they’ve done for hundreds of years. The buildings are often rubble and where they are not are plastered with adverts for toothpaste and soap. It’s such a hot place, there is not even breeze out on the harbour, and I can’t tell you what’s in the water there, it never occurred to me before I met you, there are whale sharks in the Gulf of Tadjoura I think, and volcanoes along the shore. It’s very geologically active.’

‘Is it French?’

‘Only in the Foreign Legion camps and sometimes in the harbour you can see one of those old French tramp steamers headed for Reunion and on to Calédonie. At the same time, Tarek bin Laden, who’s a brother of Osama bin Laden, wants to build the world’s longest bridge between Djibouti and Yemen across the Bab el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears, and he wants to construct cities on either side of the bridge as a hope for humanity. There will be a city for two million people in Djibouti and a city for four million people in Yemen. The projected cost is $40 billion and the start-up work is being handled by American defence contractors, with the full backing of the CIA.’

He stopped. He had strayed alarmingly into his real work: he had been seconded to look into the bridge project.

‘That’s interesting about the crossing. According to the evidence, genetic and archaeological, irrefutable, I’d say, but I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, every non-African in the world is descended from a band of thirty or so humans who made it across the Gate of Tears some 60,000 years ago, walking and wading and perhaps on rafts from Africa to Arabia. We’re all African. Nearly all of our genetic diversity
is within us, not between races. Given a similar history of migration, any African tribe will turn blond and blue-eyed. We become curdy in France and black in the sun. We’ve already escaped once as a species. We made it out of your Rift Valley to Somalia and then to the Middle East. There were no more than a few thousand of us left alive.’

‘That’s all? I can’t believe it. We must have been outnumbered at every watering hole by monkeys.’

‘What this means, genetically, is that every living person who is not African is a descendant of one of those individuals who crossed the Red Sea, while every African is a descendant of those who stayed, give or take some mixing.’ She pointed at herself, as if to say voila! ‘This explains the genetic diversity in Africa, where a villager may be further removed from his neighbour than you are from a Polynesian. This is exodus.’

She turned towards the pianist who was then playing French carols softly. He was certain that at some point in his life he would look back on this evening, at her.

‘What is it?’

He held her gaze. ‘Nothing.’ It was everything. He saw in her one possible future. Her skin, her facial features. Then again it was not so new; the febrile order of races was breaking down long before.

The evening went more slowly then, like a stone sinking into a lake. They were tired and more cosy in their tiredness, and as so often happens in long dinners, their conversation became haunting.

He started it by taking a sip of his dessert wine and telling of how, in 1597, the poet John Donne set sail to the Azores with the Earl of Essex to intercept a Spanish treasure fleet in Angra Bay on Teceira Island, with its mild climate, plentiful wood and orchards, and fields to fatten the cattle left by the sailors on their outbound voyage to the New World.

‘Donne was still a lusty mate on Essex’s adventure, a poet,’ he said, ‘but on his return to England he renounced the fugitive life to become
a clergyman. In that capacity he tremendously ministered to his congregants. His sermons and meditations minister still.’

‘“No man is an island entire of itself”,’ he recited, ‘“every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.”’

‘What do you think happens,’ he added, on his own account, ‘to bodies buried at sea?’

‘I’ve never given it much thought,’ she said, falsely. ‘It’s not dust to dust, that’s for sure, it’s water to water. We’re made of water, it’s the most obvious thing, still we don’t get it, we think we’re solid, we’re not, we’re pockets of moisture. We bleed. Our mouths, our eyes, our every opening to the air are filled with saliva, mucus, or wax. If we were too long in the sun we should soon dry up.’

‘It is a shock to be a jelly,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Are we allowed to smoke?’

‘I think so.’

‘If man is made of water, does that follow that angels are made of air?’

‘Angels are made of light. What made you think of that?’

‘Haven’t you noticed there are angels everywhere in the hotel? They’re above the entrance, in the mirror hall, on the stairs. Donne said that angels do not propagate or multiply. That they were made at first in abundance and so were stars. That raises a problem. The human population is exploding, yet the number of angels stays the same.’

‘You’re worried we’ll get lonely and won’t have anyone to show us the way?’

‘It’s what you were saying yesterday. Everything will be quantified and there will be less of everything.’

‘It’s not complicated,’ she said, her voice ever so slightly changed. ‘Suppose there is a god, a big suppose, suppose he’s all knowing, well, he’ll know before he begins what the maximum human population on earth and in the universe will be. Since he’s all powerful he’ll run the programme so that x number angels, a trillion angels, enter
existence sometime after the big bang, but he’ll make them unconscious, not quite born, until they have someone to look after. It’s just as likely newborns are awakening angels.’

‘You don’t believe?’

‘You do?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘And I’m not sorry for saying so.’

She could have pulled back at this point, from credulity, but when you are drawn to someone there are things you cannot share that come with them too. Besides, she had her own experiences, her own imaginings.

She looked at him directly. ‘I have a problem believing in anything that can’t evolve,’ she said. ‘What makes Donne an authority anyway?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Generosity? Awareness?’ Another line of Donne’s came to him. ‘“But I do nothing upon myself and yet I am my own executioner.”’

‘Do you know why in paintings you never see angels smile?’

‘No.’

‘Because they’re so ancient.’

Her work had given her a sense of the importance of imagination. It interested her that angels predated the surviving religions, and with a fineness of detail. Angels were not superheroes. They had no humours. They were flawless, inhuman. She saw a Babylonian clay box and kneeling in it a furled angel. If she lifted a lantern to it, as if adjusting a spotlight on a submersible, she would be able to see clearly the anatomy of its back and shoulders. The angel would stand, giant in her consciousness, its head bent down. She would stare up into its meteor-scarred face and its wings would open slowly, with pinguid plumage, a wider span than any sea eagle. Then the angel would get down again in the box and she would walk away, back into her own life, London, work, bills.

‘Tell me something horrible,’ she said.

‘Why would I do that? “Tis the season to be jolly.”’

‘We don’t have much time. Is that a reason?’

He was quiet. ‘It would turn your stomach.’

‘My stomach is strong enough.’

His mind raced. He was not a water engineer. He had seen violence. He had done it.

‘OK,’ he said, finally. ‘Another death rite. Do you remember the Luos I told you about in the forest in Nairobi?’

‘The hyenas digging them up? Barack Obama’s people?’

‘That’s it. Most of them live in Western Kenya, on the shores of Lake Victoria. The isolated fishing villages there still hold to traditions codified before independence in a pamphlet called the
Luo kiti gi tubege
. I’ve read it, so I’m certain that what I saw in one of the villages there was not an aberrance. A boy drowned in the reeds where the women wash clothes and the crocodiles are hidden. He was a hunchback. He was weak, the people said, and he had had difficulty walking. Before he could be buried, his hunch had to be opened. His family paid a man in goats to do the job. The price used to be paid in cows, but no one can afford a cow. The lake is fished out and the people are penniless.

‘Everyone in the village gathered around,’ he said. ‘The man sharpened his axe. I thought I was watching an execution. Then I saw the corpse laid face down on a string bed so the hunch was exposed. There was sadness, also tension; if the man made a mistake, the hunch would pass to his family. If he made no mistake, the lake would take the curse. The man drank banana wine and swung the axe about, loosening up. He ran his hands up and down the boy’s spine, searching for the spot, his hand bumped along. Finally he stood over the corpse and tapped at the point of the hunch with the axe and opened it up.’

‘I’ve seen nothing with my own eyes,’ she said, after a silence had passed between them. ‘Only the news.’

He gave a querying look.