The Other Shore. Michael Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ capacity. Not go prying into places where I have no business of being.”¹

      It was soon evident, as we talked on, that Mrs. Gifford shared my misgivings about the kind of work to which her husband had dedicated himself. My first thought was that Mrs. Gifford was, like me, skeptical about the good that comes of foreign interventions in the affairs of poor nations, or the manner in which Euro-American and Soviet interests had turned Africa into a cold war zone. But her criticism was more personal, and I was taken aback that she should confide to a twenty-four year old stranger her disillusionment.

      Before their posting to the Congo, the Giffords had spent several years in Cyprus, also with the United Nations. During this time, their two older children were in an English boarding school. But the two younger children, aged four and six, had been with them in Cyprus.

      “We are both Christians,” she said. “In fact we met at a church social. But I am afraid we differ in what our faith requires of us. For my husband, it demands unconditional devotion to the well-being of others, even to the extent of taking refugee children into our own home, regardless of the health risks to our own children. It may be that I have never fully understood Christ’s call or example. But there is a limit, especially for a mother, to what she can give others without compromising her own children. Even sending our two daughters to boarding school was, for me, an act of abandonment. Our sensitive, vulnerable, seven and eight year old girls, packed off to England filled me with such guilt. But my husband was, and remains, adamant. It will do them no harm. He left home at the same age. It toughened him. It prepared him for the work he now does for the greater glory of God. But tell me, Michael, is God’s glory greater than the happiness of a child, or the bond between a mother and her daughters?”

      I was too young for this moral burden. The questions were beyond me.

      Mrs. Gifford saw my difficulty.

      “I am so sorry. What am I doing, offloading my tribulations onto you? You have enough to worry about. How selfish of me.”

      We were sitting on an upholstered bench. A dying aspidistra, an unswept parquet floor, and a slow-moving ceiling fan provided a tawdry backdrop. Gathering around us, silent, unobtrusive and shell-shocked, were thirty or more nuns recently rescued by Belgian paratroopers from the rebel-held city of Stanleyville.

      Also distracted, Mrs. Gifford looked at the refugees and felt ashamed.

      “What they must have been through,” she said.

      I envied them. I had only glimpsed the war. And I too felt ashamed that I was leaving the Congo unscathed, that I had avoided my baptism of fire. Et j’étais déjà si mauvais poète/Que je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout.... ²

      I told Mrs. Gifford of my journeys to the interior. I cannot remember how she responded, though I think I know why I confided in her. My experiences echoed her own. It was my clumsy, makeshift way of telling her I understood her dilemma—torn between protecting those closest to her and offering succor to strangers with contagious diseases. Had I known, at this time, of Orwell’s essay on Gandhi, I might have cited it.

      For the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves. Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable.³

      We did not board the aircraft together, or sit together, or seek each other out at Le Bourget to say goodbye and exchange addresses. I remember the throng of reporters and cameramen trying to interview or photograph the nuns and priests who had been rescued from Stanleyville. I remember the sudden cold, my regret at having left the Congo, and the long taxi ride to my old hotel at 8 rue de la Harpe in the cinquième.

      I sat in the back seat, dog-tired, reluctant to talk. The driver, recognizing this, or thinking I did not speak French, kept his thoughts to himself, though I could see he wanted to talk.

      His right arm was missing. He held the wheel with his left hand, and steadied it with the two stainless steel fingers that were his right.

      I wondered whether he’d lost his arm in the war, and how he’d managed to get a license. Though the Citroën had automatic shift.

      Our eyes met in the rear view mirror. He had a Gauloise stuck in the corner of his mouth, and his face was screwed up in a permanent squint against the smoke. He looked like a man with a sense of humor and a lot of goodwill. I felt myself relaxing into the seat as we drove along the river toward the old quarter.

      Notre Dame was floodlit. In its dark moat, the Seine was slicked with oily light.

      It was raining now. Quai des Grands-Augustins. Rue Saint-Jacques.

      At the corner of the Boul’Mich, we stopped for a red light. A group of students hurried across the intersection, bundled in coats.

      They were laughing, and their faces were wet with the rain.

      The driver half turned to me, and made a small gesture with his steel hand.

      “Les jeunes s’amusent!”

      That morning, I bought a Spirax notebook and wrote of that solitary boy under the bruised rainy season skies over Lake Kivu—asking myself why I had forsaken him, who had no one dependent on me, unless it was my own undeveloped self crying out to be mentored, toughened and matured, so that it could come into its own. And with masochistic nostalgia I recalled the opening lines of A. R. D. Fairburn’s “Rhyme of the Dead Self.”

      Tonight I have taken all that I was

      and strangled him that pale lily-white lad

      I have choked him with these my hands these claws

      Catching him as he lay a-dreaming in his bed.

      FOUR

      Writing under the Influence

      ITALO CALVINO OBSERVES THAT WHEN WE READ, “we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something . . . that is . . . past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead.”¹ This was certainly the case for me in Paris. I plunged into reading Blaise Cendrars as if my life depended on it. Feverishly, I sketched a work of fiction about an imaginary figure that I had glimpsed in the pages of Cendrars’ Moravagine, Gide’s Voyage au Congo, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And there were moments, late at night, when I felt as if I was co-authoring Cendrars’ posthumous work, channeling him, a custodian of his afterlife.

      The story of Moravagine echoes its author’s biography, which in turn kaleidoscopically reminds one of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud died a few months after the amputation of his right leg; the narrator of Moravagine loses his left leg in the war, and in a Cannes hospital he encounters the writer Blaise Cendrars who has had his right arm amputated.

      Born Frédéric-Louis Sauser in the small watch-making city of La Chaux-de-Fonds (its two other famous sons were Le Corbusier and Chevrolet), Cendrars spent much of his childhood on the move. When the family returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1901 and Freddy’s father enrolled him in a trade school, the fifteen-year old rebelled. Truant and restive, he ran up bills at local wine shops and kiosks, subscribed to dirty magazines, screwed around, and yearned for the exotic elsewhere he had glimpsed in Alexandria, СКАЧАТЬ