Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

This almost anonymous person, balanced awkwardly, holding on to her own safety. Already incognito.

Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us.

In much the same way I believed my carefully recorded buildings along Lower Richmond Road were dangerously temporary, in the way great buildings had been lost during the war, in the way we lose mothers and fathers.

The city still felt wounded, uncertain of itself. It allowed one to be rule-less. Everything had already happened. Hadn’t it?

She always focused on the possibility of character. She weighed character, could discover it in a few grains of a person, even in one’s noncommittal silence.

“That scrape is a badger. Not digging, just his paws moving. Really, it’s something tender. Perhaps the end of a fearful dream. Just the remains of a small uneven nightmare in his head. We all have nightmares. For you, dear Rachel, it might be imagining the fear of a seizure. But there need not be fear in a dream, just as there’s no danger from the rain while we are under the trees.

and I came to love the thousand and one sounds of the river around us, that let us be silent as if in a suddenly thoughtful universe within this rushing world. It was resplendent.

“I’ve found more clouds of grey—than any Russian play—could guarantee.”

She brought a few pamphlets about the trees and about pond life, nameless to her until now. Then one about Waltham Abbey, so she could rattle off information about what had been created there—guncotton in the 1860s, then bolt-action rifles, carbines, submachine guns, flare pistols, mortar shells, all of them made only miles north of the Thames at that monastery. Agnes was a dry sponge for information, and after one or two trips knew more about what had gone on at the abbey than the lock keepers we passed. It was a monk, she told us, a monk! in the thirteenth century who wrote about the formation of gunpowder, though being fearful of this discovery he had written out the details in Latin. —

Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?

You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing. Unless of course you wish, like my sister, to damn and enact revenge on the whole pack of them.

It was also clear she had continued with the upkeep of the garden since the death of her husband, Mr. Malakite, two years earlier. Only the recent memories, with no one now to share them, had begun to evaporate.

I was at a football match with Mr. Nkoma. I was in mid-river eating sandwiches with Sam Malakite. “Listen,” Sam Malakite says. “A thrush.” And Agnes naked, to feel fully undressed, was pulling a green ribbon out of her hair. That unforgotten thrush. That unforgettable ribbon.

The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out. But

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures.

“When he comes, he will be like an Englishman….”

Rose had written this in one of her spare journals I found after her death. As if even in the privacy of her home, even in a secret notebook, she needed to be careful with the revelation of a possibility. She may even have muttered it mantra-like to herself. When he comes, he will be like an Englishman….

A changeling discovers his own bloodline. So I was never to know him as well as I knew The Darter or The Moth. It was as if the two of them were in a book I was reading in my father’s absence and they would be the ones I learned from. I desired unstoppable adventures with them, or even a romance with a girl in a cafeteria who might fade from my life unless I acted, insisted. Because that was what fate was.

“I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion.” When

But the youngest son, Marsh, whenever he was allowed free time, attempted to overcome his limp. He’d wake in the dark and walk past houses they had once thatched, or go down into the river valleys as night began dissolving, already with birdsong. It was the hour with that tense new light that Marsh Felon now began searching for in books whenever the writer strayed from a plot to attempt a description of that special hour, perhaps remembered from the author’s youth too. The boy began reading every evening. It allowed him a deafness while his brothers talked. Even if he knew the thatcher’s craft, he was separating himself from them.

Plenitude. What does that mean, exactly? A surfeit of things? Replenishment? A complete state? A wished-for thing? The person named Marsh Felon wished to study and inhale the world around him. When Rose’s family rediscovered him two years later, a young man, they barely recognized him at first. He was still watchful, but he had become another, already serious, curious about the workings of the wider world. Her parents gathered him in as they had once done during the injured solitude of his youth. Aware of his intelligence, they were to support him through his university years. He had essentially left his own family.

She’d taught him the “lost-roof technique” on the heights of Trinity, a phrase, she said, borrowed from Japanese art, where a high perspective, as from a belfry or cloister roof, allows you to see over walls into usually hidden distances, as if into other lives and countries, to discover what might be occurring there, a lateral awareness allowed by height.

So he proposes an idea of work to this brightest of women to whom he had once taught all manner of things: that list of the oldest rocks in the county in order of age; the best wood for an arrow, for a fishing rod—the wood she has just recognized by its smell as she held his gift to her face, when he saw the thrill of her smile. Ash. He wants her in his world.

Childhood had been intimate and benign. That was him as he may originally have wished to be, the amateur lover of the natural world he entered whenever he could.

“The important thing is I need to teach you to protect those you love.”

She had not been a lover as she had been this night for a long time. What would it be like for him, she wondered, to leave her after this? Would it be like one of his historical anecdotes, where a small army departed a Carolingian border town with courtesy and silence, or would everything around them clatter with repercussions? She would need to leave him before that happened, leave a pawn blocking the river bridge, so neither she nor he could cross it anymore, to make clear it was an ending after this sudden and remarkable glimpse of the other. It needed to still be her life.

“Historical studies inevitably omit the place of the accidental in life,” we are told.

A self-made man. An arriviste. Therefore not trusted as authentic by some in the trade, not even himself.

And now they have somehow entered the fifteenth century, with a thousand or so remnants confiscated from monasteries or surrendered by overthrown aristocracies, even incunabula from the infancy of printing.

All of it gathered and protected here after once being damned and therefore hidden for generations. “This is the great afterlife,” Felon tells her.

Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend.

She has adored this man all her life but feels the clash of herself against this ancient place. This is the great afterlife. Just as she perhaps is his. Did he always see her this way? She’s drunk with this small perception.

Who made me move from just an interest in “characters” to what they would do to others? But above all, most of all, how much damage did I do?