Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

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

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.

There were parts of the city where you saw no one, only a few children, walking solitary, listless as small ghosts. It was a time of war ghosts, the grey buildings unlit, even at night, their shattered windows still covered over with black material where glass had been. The city still felt wounded, uncertain of itself. It allowed one to be rule-less. Everything had already happened. Hadn’t it?

When Olive Lawrence spoke it was more like a private shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her knowledge, an idea she was still unsure about.

Remember that. Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.”

In youth we are not so much embarrassed by the reality of our situation as fearful others might discover and judge it.

But it was not The Darter she was drawing, as I thought, but me. Just a youth looking towards something or someone. As if this was what I really was, perhaps would become, someone not intent on knowing himself but preoccupied with others. I recognized it even then as a truth. It was not a picture of me but about me.

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

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.

He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures. He tugged off a sprig from every bush of rosemary he passed, smelled it, and preserved it in his shirt pocket. Any river he came to distracted him. On hot days he removed his boots and clothes and swam through reeds, cigarette smoke still escaping from his mouth. He taught me where to find those rare parasol mushrooms like fawn-coloured umbrellas, with their pale gills underneath, that are to be found in open fields. “Only in open fields,” Sam Malakite would say, holding up a glass of water as if making a toast. Years later when I heard he had died, I held up my glass and said, “Only in open fields.” I was alone in a restaurant when I said this.

The breeze lifted itself over the shallow hill and entered what felt like our dark room, rustling against us. Could have stayed there forever, under that mulberry. The ants in the grass climbing their green towers.

I think it was becoming clear that it was not just my mother’s past that had become buried and anonymous. I felt I too had disappeared. I had lost my youth.

When Mr. Malakite drove me home on Wednesdays, she always invited him in for tea and fish-paste sandwiches,

She tended to see no one but Mr. Malakite, or now and then the postman. She even insisted on having no pets. As a result there was a feral cat who lived outside and a rat who lived indoors.

I shared with my mother a preference for privacy and solitude. A room without argument and a sparse table appealed to both of us.

“Defence is attack.” Said more than once. “The first thing a good military leader knows is the art of retreating. It’s important how you get in and then how you get out undamaged.

The past—my mother knew more than anyone—never remains in the past.

So many unlabelled splinters in my memory. In my grandparents’ bedroom, I had been shown formal pictures of my mother as a student but there was not one of my father. Even after her death, when I scurried around White Paint to discover whatever clues I could find of her life and death, I came across no photographic evidence of him. All I knew was that the political maps of his era were vast and coastal and I would never know if he was close to us or had disappeared into one of those distances forever, a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.

When we were small our mother used to say, A cuckoo from the east means comfort, from the west luck, from the north sadness, from the south death.

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.

“You need to know not just how to enter a battle zone but how to get out of it. Wars don’t end. They never remain in the past.

“The brilliant are often destructive.”

“A fish camouflaged in shadow is no longer a fish, just a corner of landscape, as if it has another language, the way we need to be unknown sometimes.

There are always miracles here, they say about Naples.

Posillipo is the name for the rich part of the city, meaning “break from sorrow.” A Greek word, still used in Italy.

It feels medieval, the kind of canvas of a master Felon loved to describe, pointing out its hidden structures, how a crowd radiates out and fills the canvas from something as small as a loaf of bread, which gives it all an anchor.

Wars are never over. ‘Seville to wound. Córdoba to die in.’

She has never met Felon as an uncertain person: it is the remade man she knows. He has shown her over the years the great vistas she desired; but she thinks now that perhaps the truth of what is before you is clear only to those who lack certainty.

My ally, she thinks. She remembers small particles of their history she will never be able to let go of, some forgotten whisper of confidence, some grip of his hand, a recognition across a room,

So much left unburied at the end of a war.

“Well, you have changed. You barely spoke the first season you worked with me.” “I was shy,” I said. “No, you were quiet,” he said, being more aware and conscious of what I had been than I was. “You have a quiet heart.”

That familiar false modesty of the English, which included absurd secrecy or the cliché of an innocent boffin, was somewhat like those carefully painted formal dioramas that hid the truth and closed the door on their private selves. It had concealed in some ways the most remarkable theatrical performance of any European nation.

“Never plan a lie,” he told me during one of those night journeys. “Invent as you go along. It’s more believable.”

We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.

If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written.

We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken—Rachel,