Time Was Read online

  Dealerdom and those few bookstore owners who hadn’t barred me for serial Wi-Fi abuse held a wake for me in a terrible pub in Bloomsbury trading long on overdrawn literary associations and short on charisma. Thorn’s app would have shown us somewhere better. Thorn was absent. I didn’t want my book colleagues to meet her.

  “It’s not like I’m dead,” I said. “It’s only Lincolnshire.”

  “Better death than Lincolnshire,” Louisa in Louboutins intoned.

  “They have bookstores in King’s Lynn,” I insisted.

  “They have line dancing in King’s Lynn,” Tall Lionel reminded me. “And motor sport.”

  I couldn’t deny the motor sport.

  Shahrzad sent halva and hugs over the phone. Love to be there, sweetie, but I’m at a conference in Madrid with Fucking Charlie Greenall. How had that story panned out anyway? Deliciously?

  The Goritsa fragment had thrilled and frozen us. It was as if we had opened a drawer of our parents’ secrets and now we feared that what we had seen would break all our familiar delusions. Immortals, Thorn had whispered. Craziness. But how else could we explain what we had seen? We drew back; we folded the secrets and closed the drawer. What if we had caught the gaze of beings—powers—beyond our comprehension? Glamour is danger.

  But glamour attracts, and one night at the death of the old year, with the wind whipping sleet in from the North Sea and bending the poplars to the ground, we took a bottle to the wood-burning stove and gazed into the glamour. Leland was wind-crazy, clacking around the house with his stick, unable to settle, as if his private gods were circling above him. Hirne House creaked and cracked. The plastic sheeting covering the new build flapped and rattled. In the morning we would find it shredded across fifteen miles of hedgerow and barbed-wire fence.

  “Immortals,” Thorn said. She poured supermarket port. “Like Highlander. An ancient order of immortals, careful of their secrets, hidden from history.”

  “If I were an immortal, the last place I would put myself is the middle of the biggest wars in history,” I said.

  Thorn kicked off her boots and curled up beside me on the collapsing leather sofa.

  “So? You’re immortal.”

  “So a seventy-five-millimeter artillery round scores a direct hit and you walk away not a hair out of place?” I said. “That’s not immortal; that’s indestructible. Captain Scarlet, not Highlander.”

  “Immortal is, you cannot die.”

  “Immortal is, you live forever, unless something kills you. Indestructible breaks the laws of physics. Thermodynamics, even before you get to biology. Indestructible is magic. It’s miracles in the real world. It’s like moving statues and weeping Madonnas and the sun standing still at Fatima. It breaks everything. That’s not the world we can exist in.”

  “Yet there they were.”

  “I can believe in beings with incredibly long lives. But they can die. Seventy-five-millimeter artillery shells can kill them as quickly and completely as you or I. Amortal, I suppose.”

  “Can’t have amortal. It’s already taken. It means never really living in the first place. It’s from Harry Potter.”

  “Emortal, then. I read that in an old SF book. How old did they look in the Bosnian War picture?”

  “Late thirties,” Thorn said. I had no eye for the subtleties of the Seven Ages. People were young until they were middle-aged until they were senior. “In the Sandringham picture, I’d say midtwenties at the most.”

  “We can work this out,” I said, and while Thorn shooed the shepherd-collie away from the bottle of port glowing in the firelight I hauled an old bank statement from the unopened pile on the coffee table and ran a few numbers in the margin. “So, say they age an apparent twelve years between 1915 and 1995. That’s a ratio of six-point-six years of ours to one of theirs.”

  “Like dog years.” Thorn ruffled the shepherd-collie’s ear with her foot. “So, if they were late twenties in 1899 . . .”

  “They were born sometime in the seventeen seventies,” I said, and felt cold steal in from the dying part of the house and caress my spine.

  “And they’re still out there,” Thorn said in a suddenly small voice.

  I imagined the emortals, always among us, always apart, ever wary of the mortal host that if it ever learned of their existence would stop at nothing to tear their secrets from them.

  And if they were discovered, what would they do to regain their anonymity? I shivered again, despite the enormous heat glowing from the cast-iron stove. Dogs stirred and groaned, weakly thumping tails in the expectation of a run outside, collapsing in a sigh onto the rug when they heard the sleet pelt the ill-fitting windows.

  “Do you want another bottle of port?” Thorn said.

  “Oh, go on.”

  The dogs looked up as Thorn went into the ramshackle kitchen. I heard a cork squeak.

  “Leland has a stash,” Thorn said, returning with a dusty bottle. “Anson laid it down for him. He’ll never drink it all. It could be a bit sedimenty.”

  “Pass me the laptop. I’d like another look at that documentary.”

  “You’ve already seen it ten times,” Thorn complained, but handed it over. I opened the player and turned down the volume. “What are you looking for?”

  A thing I might have glimpsed and forgotten, a detail the camera might inadvertently have captured, a clue that might lead us forward from this seeming dead stop on a mountain road in Bosnia. Shahrzad’s gift is to recognize and remember. My gift is smaller and less flashy: I notice. I stabbed a finger at the screen.

  “There.”

  Thorn leaned in until her face almost touched the screen. Blue lit, ambient with port and patchouli.

  “What?”

  “That little speck on the parapet. Next to Chappell.”

  “That’s their lunch.”

  “Can you zoom this thing in?”

  “Like Blade Runner? Enhance thirty-four to forty-six?”

  “Just show me how to do it.”

  “You unpinch. Like this.”

  The resolution was dire, almost as bad as the screen-grab, but my talent had led me true. I stretched the image to its limits, a tiny square of color, a handful of pixels. A fleck of color. I increased the color saturation. Green. Green as God’s eyes.

  “The book,” I said. “I found the letter in it; the Gallipoli letters mentioned it. That’s the book. Time Was.”

  “And?” Thorn poured more time-dark port.

  “I think if you find the book, you find them.”

  A door creaked open. Sudden wind, free in the house, made the fire flare up. The dogs roused, eyes wide. The door slammed. We sat paralyzed with fear; then Thorn leapt to her feet.

  “Fucking Leland!” She rushed in her stocking feet to the front door. “He’s only gone outside to check the level in the Drain!”

  It took her fifteen minutes to haul Leland, barefoot in his dressing gown, back from the treacherous edge of the river into the house, get him into bed, tranquilize him with whisky. By the time she made it back wet-footed to the port the fire had died down to embers, the dogs gone, the room cooling, and the ghosts, gods and immortals we had summoned had dissolved back into wind.

  “The Frig bedroom has terrible draughts, Emmett,” Thorn said.

  I thought of telling her about the new leak, inscribing a black powdery fungus stain into the exterior corner of the wall, but I had a hope of where this was going.

  “And that shit three-bar heater. The Othun bedroom, however, is draft-free, centrally heated, and can offer the additional comfort of my fine warm ass.”

  She got up, careful to show me that ass in her threadbare Adidas leggings.

  “I’ll bring the bottle. You bring the glasses.”

  * * *

  Thorn had to apply for a passport. I found it astonishing that a modern woman had never been outside the UK. I fretted through the tedious process of form filling and submitting photographs and finding someone respectable to authenticate the photo
graphs—I offered, as a respectable entrepreneur in the used-book trade, but she went for the vicar—and having the thing couriered back to her. I fidgeted that every delay meant that the book might be gone—I’d e-mailed, I’d even called, but from the replies it was clear that my execrable French had dropped into a Manche of miscommunication. I think the shop had reserved it, but at every instant I feared someone walking out with it in a nicely printed canvas bookstore bag.

  La Sauterelle was a maze of rooms on five different floors around a courtyard off the Rue des Saints-Pères. It smelled of coffee, cat piss, must and stale perfume. It smelled of Thorn’s world, I realized.

  It took me twenty minutes to find Time Was. The buyer who bought it from me had been an agent. Not for secret immortals, but for a Left Bank bookstore specializing in the arcane, the hard to get, the unique. I e-mailed La Sauterelle, booked train tickets and fretted for a week while Thorn got a passport.

  La Sauterelle was created to caress my bibliophile nerve endings. Eccentric architecture. Stacks in corridors, staircases lined with books so you had to side-wind up them, cautious of triggering a paper avalanche; rooms connected like synapses. Idiosyncratic cataloguing: by jacket color rather than subject, by poetic theme, by the geographical location of the author. An entire room was dedicated to pastry-cooking. I knew I could lose hours—ideally days—in this paper labyrinth. Our train left Gare du Nord at 21:13.

  The store had reserved it for me. “They are much sought after,” the woman at the Belle Epoque table that was the cash desk told me. “The owner has instructions.”

  “Instructions?”

  “They are quite old. From the earliest days of the store. They are passed down, generation to generation. It is a special book.”

  “How old is the store?”

  “One hundred and twenty-five years next July.”

  I picked up the book. I felt its heft, the grain of its cover, the slight tear of ragged edges of the bound signatures. I opened it, sniffed the pages. Fusty, still damp from the dumpster where I had found it months before, outside the corpse of The Golden Page. Not the smell of a 125-year-old book.

  “I sold this copy to one of your book-finders. I found it outside an old bookstore in London.”

  “I understand there are others.”

  “Bookstores with . . . instructions?”

  “Part of the instructions are that, should one of those stores close, the book is to go to another. The London store had clearly forgotten their instructions.”

  “You have another copy?”

  “Of course we do.”

  She swiped panes on the tablet.

  “Anonymous poetry. The end section. Between ‘patisserie’ and ‘boulangerie.’”

  I texted Thorn, who had wandered off, enchanted by the mustiness, magic and decrepitude. She beat me to the place between “patisserie” and “boulangerie.” She held the book in her hands. I crackled with an unexpected sense of resentment. I wanted to snatch it from her unworthy hands.

  “Look,” she said. The book fell open in her hands. Tucked between the pages, a letter. I read the heading: Nanking, January 12th, 1937.

  “I have to have it.”

  The young woman at the Belle Epoque table looked up from her tablet.

  ‘I can’t sell that to you, sir.”

  “But you have another one.”

  “Unfortunately, sir, the instructions . . .”

  “Who can you sell it to?”

  “Once again, sir . . .”

  “The instructions . . .”

  “We understand,” Thorn said. “I’ll put it back for you.” Once we were out of sight of the woman at the Belle Epoque table Thorn snatched the book from my grasp. Once again I felt a spike of unwarranted jealousy. “You need to be a little bit more fen, Emmett,” she said, took the letter, folded it, slipped it into her backpack and slid the book back into its place between “patisserie” and “boulangerie.”

  We nodded sincere thank-yous to the young woman at the table and stepped through the courtyard’s carriage door on Rue des Saints-Pères.

  “Now buy me a fucking drink, Emmett Leigh.”

  I bought her a fucking drink, then another, then another, and we drank our way back across Paris to the Gare du Nord, and in the Gare du Nord and on the Eurostar. Only as the train entered the tunnel, when we felt safe from any chance of our small crime being discovered, did we open the letter and flatten it on the table. Thorn pressed close against me. The darkness of the tunnel was absolute.

  Nanking,January 12th, 1937

  Tom my love,

  I don’t know where this letter will find you—or even if.

  I am safe. All Europeans are inside the International Zone. Outside, the killing continues unabated. I made it out just ahead of the defeat at Shanghai on the next to last gunboat. China is lost: Chiang Kai-shek has withdrawn with the remains of his army deep into the west to Chungking, his capital is fallen and the Imperial Army of Japan engages in a butchery that exceeds my capacity for horror.

  Herr Rabe is of the opinion that it is only a matter of time before the Japanese tire of our posturing, end our pretense of governorship of the city and dismember our enclave. Yet his moral authority and his personal courage still stand between the two hundred and fifty thousand citizens of Nanking who have taken refuge inside the Safety Zone and the Imperial Army. He is unafraid to play the political card: at the worst of the bombing Rabe sent a cable to Berlin and within the week the Japanese had switched from indiscriminate air raids to attacking military and industrial targets. But we are never allowed to forget that we endure by sufferance. The soldiers outside our house pointedly unload and reload their weapons, or sharpen their bayonets.

  Rabe fascinates me: a German, a Nazi, a party member with the ear of the Führer. He is a good man in hell. Yet I find it impossible not to regard him with the eye of what we have seen, what history has yet to see and judge him in the light of what his party and nation will unleash on humanity. It is also impossible not to wish, with that same foresight, that I had read more reports of this overlooked atrocity in what is to us a far and alien land. Rabe’s concern for the people of the city, his revulsion at the atrocities carried on with unstinting enthusiasm beyond the safety of our small enclave, are genuine and heartfelt.

  Am I a monster because, in the midst of a horror beyond even Christian imaginings of hell, I am relieved? Relieved because I had feared myself insensitive to horror. After everything we have seen, everything we have shared—and which pulls us back, time and time again—I find that there are horrors beyond even those of Gallipoli, Bosnia, the White War—here are horrors that spark emotion in me, revulsion, dread. A horror beyond even those of war, because it is both calculating and casual.

  Butchery. Savagery. Atrocity. Again and again, these words. They do not suffice, yet there are no others. Outside our enclave, the Imperial Army unleashes violence beyond belief upon the citizens of Nanking. A third of the city lies in ruins. The mass executions continue daily: the sound of a firing squad is particular and distinctive, yet even the shootings are not enough. Magee tells me that he has photographed decapitation competitions; the soldiers see a Western photographer and push him to the front to show off their prowess. I have heard of mass drownings, burnings, live burials. I could write for pages of the sheer brutality of numbers—the beheading races, the bulldozings in mass graves—but it is the individual violations that offend most egregiously, because they are personal; calculatedly callous. The decapitated head with the cigarette placed in its mouth. The Chinese boy beaten to death with rifle butts because he refused to doff his hat to the soldiers. The man buried up to the neck and then stoned to death with bricks from his own home. The woman raped and shot, her skirt up over her face but her private parts exposed and propped open with a cane.

  I walk between these abominations as if between burning pillars, immune but not immunized. Don’t come to China, Ben. Wherever you are, stay there. I will find you. The world darkens
and narrows; the places where we can communicate, where we can meet, are diminishing and departing. I believe Rabe when he says that the life of the Safety Zone is measured in days. What will happen I don’t know. The civilians will be removed. What will happen to them I cannot say. The remaining Chinese soldiers will be exterminated. And the Europeans, the Americans? That’s why the International Safety Zone Committee has decided someone must bear the testimony of the Rape of Nanking.

  That’s me.

  McDaniel has given me a roll of undeveloped film, which I am smuggling downriver to Shanghai, where it can be got to the Associated Press office and wired to the world. I am aboard a riverboat; HMS Danae is still running refugees from the Bund down to Hong Kong. I will only be a few days, a week at most, in Shanghai before the (as we now know) temporary safety of Hong Kong. Then I will try and get to Australia or South Africa.

  We drove through a hundred yards of bodies to reach the port. The dogs were already at work. Winter in Nanking is chilly, but the stench of rot—of mass, bloody death—followed us down the Yangtze for many miles. The Japanese searched me, of course. They confiscated my notebook, but left me the Time Was. I will bring this one with me as far as I can, but I will leave messages in Shanghai and Hong Kong. The film of course they did not find.

  I know that I shall never be clean again. Some talk of scars, some talk of wounds, some of hurt and healing, but what I have seen here I can best describe as a pollution; a filth; a defilement not just of the body but of the soul; a deep stain, dyed into every fibre of me, that will never come out. Tattooed into my heart. And my great fear is that I won’t find you, that this time we will each be whirled onward, never knowing. I couldn’t bear to lose you. Even a moment, even our eyes meeting across the steps of the Madeleine, through the gloom of a London fog, would be enough.

  Time was, time will be again,

  Ben

  The train came out of the tunnel into a different darkness. Our faces were reflected in the night-mirrored window. The passenger opposite us had fallen into a doze.

  “Not immortals,” Thorn said.