J. Ledgard - Submergence

‘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.’