Several times in the course of those long walks we took together, beside the sad velvet broth of the canal, I found myself wondering what was the quality in him which arrested me. This was before I knew anything about the Cabal. Though he reads widely Balthazar’s conversation is not heavily loaded with the kind of material that might make one think him bookish: like Pursewarden. He loves poetry, parable, science and sophistry — but there is a lightness of touch and a judgement behind his thinking. Yet underneath the lightness there is something else — a resonance which gives his thinking density. His vein is aphoristic, and it sometimes gives him the touch of a minor oracle. I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found a philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it. I think this is the unanalysed quality which gives his talk cutting-edge.
As a doctor he spends much of his working-time in the government clinic for venereal disease. (He once said dryly: ‘I live at the centre of the city’s life — its genito-urinary system: it is a sobering sort of place.’) Then, too, he is the only man whose paederasty is somehow no qualification of his innate masculinity of mind. He is neither a puritan nor its opposite. Often I have entered his little room in the Rue Lepsius — the one with the creaking cane chair — and found him asleep in bed with a sailor. He has neither excused himself at such a time nor even alluded to his bedfellow. While dressing he will sometimes turn and tenderly tuck the sheet round his partner’s sleeping form. I take this naturalness as a compliment.
He is a strange mixture; at times I have heard his voice tremble with emotion as he alludes to some aspect of the Cabal which he has been trying to make comprehensible to the study-group. Yet once when I spoke enthusiastically of some remarks he had made he sighed and said, with that perfect Alexandrian scepticism which somehow underlay an unquestionable belief in and devotion to the Gnosis: ‘We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.’ At another time after a long and tiresome argument with Justine about heredity and environment he said: ‘Ah! my dear, after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we say we really know about man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.’
He had been a fellow-student and close friend of the old poet, and of him he spoke with such warmth and penetration that what he had to say always moved me. ‘I sometimes think that I learned more from studying him than I did from studying philosophy. His exquisite balance of irony and tenderness would have put him among the saints had he been a religious man. He was by divine choice only a poet and often unhappy but with him one had the feeling that he was catching every minute as it flew and turning it upside down to expose its happy side. He was really using himself up, his inner self, in living. Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag. To the Cartesian proposition: “I think, therefore I am”, he opposed his own, which must have gone something like this: “I imagine, therefore I belong and am free”.’
Of himself Balthazar once said wryly: ‘I am a Jew, with all the Jew’s bloodthirsty interest in the ratiocinative faculty. It is the clue to many of the weaknesses in my thinking, and which I am learning to balance up with the rest of me — through the Cabal chiefly.’
* * * * *
I remember meeting him, too, one bleak winter evening, walking along the rain-swept Corniche, dodging the sudden gushes of salt water from the conduits which lined it. Under the black hat a skull ringing with Smyrna, and the Sporades where his childhood lay. Under the black hat too the haunting illumination of a truth which he afterwards tried to convey to me in an English not the less faultless for having been learned. We had met before, it is true, but glancingly: and would have perhaps passed each other with a nod had not his agitation made him stop me and take my arm. ‘Ah! you can help me!’ he cried, taking me by the arm. ‘Please help me.’ His pale face with its gleaming goat-eyes lowered itself towards mine in the approaching dusk.
The first blank lamps had begun to stiffen the damp paper background of Alexandria. The sea-wall with its lines of cafes swallowed in the spray glowed with a smudged and trembling phosphorescence. The wind blew dead south. Mareotis crouched among the reeds, stiff as a crouching sphinx. He was looking, he said, for the key to his watch — the beautiful gold pocket-watch which had been made in Munich. I thought afterwards that behind the urgency of his expression he masked the symbolic meaning that this watch had for him: signifying the unbound time which flowed through his body and mine, marked off for so many years now by this historic timepiece. Munich, Zagreb, the Carpathians. … The watch had belonged to his father. A tall Jew, dressed in furs, riding in a sledge. He had crossed into Poland lying in his mother’s arms, knowing only that the jewels she wore in that snowlit landscape were icy cold to the touch. The watch had ticked softly against his father’s body as well as his own — like time fermenting in them. It was wound by a small key in the shape of an
We went, I remember, to a cafe on the sea-front and sat despondently before a black coffee while he croaked on about this historic watch. It was during this conversation that he said: ‘I think you know Justine. She has spoken to me warmly of you. She will bring you to the Cabal.’ ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘We study the Cabbala’ he said almost shyly; ‘we are a sort of small lodge. She said you knew something about it and would be interested.’ This astonished me for I had never, as far as I knew, mentioned to Justine any line of study which I was pursuing — in between long bouts of lethargy and self-disgust. And as far as I knew the little suitcase containing the Hermetica and other books of the kind had always been kept under my bed locked. I said nothing however. He spoke now of Nessim, saying: ‘Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconceived idea of what he wants in return for his love. And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty. Children have it. So has he. I am serious.’
‘Did you know the writer Arnauti?’
‘Yes. The author of
‘Tell me about him.’
‘He intruded on us, but he did not see the spiritual city underlying the temporal one. Gifted, sensitive, but very French. He found Justine too young to be more than hurt by her. It was ill luck. Had he found another a little older — all our women are Justines, you know, in different styles — he might have — I will not say written better, for his book is well written: but he might have found in it a sort of resolution which would have made it more truly a work of art.’
He paused and took a long pull at his pipe before adding slowly: ‘You see in his book he avoided dealing with a number of things which he knew to be true of Justine, but which he ignored for purely artistic purposes — like the incident of her child. I suppose he thought it smacked of melodrama.’
‘What child was this?’
‘Justine had a child, by whom I do not know. It was kidnapped and disappeared one day. About six years old. A girl. These things do happen quite frequently in Egypt as you know. Later she heard that it had been seen or recognized and began a frantic hunt for it through the Arab quarter of every town, through every house of ill-fame, since you know what happens to parentless children in Egypt. Arnauti never mentioned this, though he often helped her follow up clues, and he must have seen how much this loss contributed to her unhappiness.’
‘Who did Justine love before Arnauti?’
‘I cannot remember. You know many of Justine’s lovers remained her friends; but more often I think you could say that her truest friends were never lovers. The town is always ready to gossip.’
But I was thinking of a passage in
Balthazar said quietly: ‘Thank God I have been spared an undue interest in love. At least the invert escapes this fearful struggle to give oneself to another. Lying with one’s own kind, enjoying an experience, one can still keep free the part of one’s mind which dwells in Plato, or gardening, or the differential calculus. Sex has left the body and entered the imagination now; that is why Arnauti suffered so much with Justine, because she preyed upon all that
