The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [44]
I remember still how we moved in that canal, our visibility muted, and those sounds that were messages from shore, and the sleepers on deck missing this panorama of activity. We were on the railing bucking up and down. We could have fallen and lost our ship and begun another fate—as paupers or as princes. “Uncle!” we shouted, if someone was close enough to distinguish our small figures. “Hullo, Uncle!” And people would wave, fling us a grin. Everyone who saw us sliding by was an uncle that night. Someone threw us an orange. An orange from the desert! Cassius kept shouting for beedis, but they did not understand him. A dockworker held up something, a plant or an animal, but the darkness disguised it too well.
No other vessel would be travelling that night in the Canal’s dark waters. Radio contact had been at work for more than a day so that we would enter, as we had to, at the very moment of midnight. Under a swaying cord of electrical light, down there onshore, was a man sitting at a makeshift table, filling out forms he handed to a runner who caught up with the ship and flung the papers with a metal weight so they landed at the feet of one of the sailors. We never stopped moving, we passed the runner, as well as the man at the table furiously recording the charts of exchange, and a canteen cook beside an open fire roasting a thing whose odour was a gift, a desire in the night, a temptation to abandon the ship after all the European food we had been eating for days. Cassius said, “That is what frankincense smells like.” And so our ship continued, guided by these strangers. We were collecting what was fresh from the land, bartering for objects thrown on board. Who knows what was exchanged that night, and what cross-fertilization occurred as the legal papers of entrance and exit were signed and passed back down to land, while we entered and left the brief and temporary world of El Suweis.
We drifted into morning light. Clotted clouds speckled the sky. We hadn’t seen clouds for our whole journey, save the dark mountains of them that banked above our ship and fell upon us during the storms. Then, approaching Port Said, a sandstorm rose up and hung over us, a last gasp from Arabia that caused havoc with the ship’s radar signals. This was the reason our arrival at El Suweis had been carefully timed to begin at midnight—in order that we would reach Port Said in daylight, when navigation could be based on what could be seen with human sight. So we entered the Mediterranean with our eyes wide open.
THERE WAS A TIME IN MY LATE TWENTIES when I suddenly had an urge to meet with Cassius again. While I had kept in touch with and spent time with Ramadhin and his family, I had not seen Cassius since the day our ship docked in England.
And during this period when I had the desire to see him, I came across an announcement in a London newspaper. There was a photograph of him. I would not have recognized the face except that it had his name beside it. Older, darker, as different as I probably was from the boy I had been on board that ship in the 1950s. It was an advertisement for a show of his paintings. And so I went into the city, to a gallery on Cork Street. I went there not so much to see his art as to make contact with him, to have, I hoped, a long meal together and talk and talk and talk. I knew little of what had happened to him since our three weeks together, although I knew he had become a well-considered painter. That had surprised me. But was he as wild, I wondered. And had he remained