The High Place (3 page)

My welcome within the gate of Kasr-el-Sittat—a simple, white farm gate—was sufficient, but not at all effusive. I gave my name and asked for Elisa Cantemir. I was told that she was
away and would be back in the evening. The few colonists around the entrance and the garage didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I found out afterwards that European visitors invariably
came from Aleppo in the colony’s transport, so I didn’t fit into any recognized routine.

I made things easy for them by playing the expert commer­cial traveller and going straight to the workshops where two tractors and a hopper were under repair. There, over the question of a
stripped bevel drive, I proved myself to have the earnest usefulness that seemed to be expected by the colonist; and they, in the intervals of our technicalities, were eager to explain their
experiment.

They had all at some time been refugees or displaced persons, and they ran Kasr-el-Sittat as a communal property on the lines of a Jewish kibutz in Palestine—except that a few rich members
had financed the whole venture out of their own capital. Men and women worked at whatever they liked. The workshops, the water and electricity, the laboratory, the hospi­tal and the kitchens
occupied those with professional skill. Others, with the full approval of their fellows, were presented with the leisure for intellectual and political interests. A few—those who were
accustomed to Mediterranean agriculture—supervized the estates. The colony owned orchards, vineyards and tobacco plantations, and enough pasture and arable land to be self-supporting. I
needn’t have bothered about local labour. Kasr-el-Sittat used all the villagers it could get, and wanted more.

After a while I wandered off to have a look at the ruins. The houses, linked together by irregular pathways, rose up through scattered timber to the bare crest of the ridge, where they stopped
short at the edge of a shallow prehistoric ditch. Within the ditch, great flagstones and the drums of fallen columns appeared here and there above the turf. In the middle was the altar, tilted and
split but easily recognizable. It was flanked by two magnificent cedars, one to the north of the altar and one to the south. These trees and the open space between the top­most houses gave the
impression of a village green.

I sat in this lovely clearing, which commanded the whole sweep of the valley, and felt, I remember, disappointed. The colonists whom I had met in the workshops and on my way up the hill seemed a
prosaic lot to be withdrawn from the world in the little houses of this divine seraglio. True, I felt they were dedicated to something more than their own content; but they inspired in me only
pity, and that boredom which often accom­panies it—unless one is a saint or a professional interferer with the lives of others.

This complacent and somewhat provincial mood of mine was swiftly shaken. A man of indeterminate age—he must have been more than ten years older than the fifty which he
looked—strolled casually across the green to join me. In spite of rough and quite neutral clothing, his grey-haired elegance was obvious. Indeed, if he had actually been wearing the London
tailor’s country clothes that hung, invisibly, from his shoulders, I think his distinction would have been less. As it was, attention was concentrated upon his bearing and his manner.

‘I am sorry, Mr. Amberson,’ he said. ‘They only just told me you were here. You must, I think,’ he added with a smile, ‘be the man who wouldn’t sell Elisa
Cantemir what she wanted.’

I explained that really we had been talking at cross purposes. She hadn’t told me that the estate was pretty well mechanized already.

‘Oh, don’t apologize!’ he replied. ‘She has a most disconcert­ing trick of drawing the essentials from any casual acquaintance whom she likes. From you, for example,
that you don’t believe in material progress. But I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Osterling.’

‘Osterling!’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought that you——’

‘No, not dead. Diplomats, you must remember, are like bishops. Their judicial murder is too complicated to be worth the trouble.’

Osterling’s presence at Kasr-el-Sittat was indeed a signal that I should not judge the colony too hastily. Before the war he had worked for a league of Balkan monarchs, with a possible
extension westwards by means of a Hapsburg restoratio; and I had been entertained by his brilliant autobiography which made you think he cared for nothing but the frivolities of aristocracy, and
then forced you to admit that the irresponsi­bilities of the professional democrats who followed were in­finitely more inane. His opinions, of course, were anathema to Hitler, and I did not
think he had survived the invasion of Austria.

‘They always funked it,’ he said, ‘when it came to the point.’

‘Was that often?’

‘It had ceased to concern me very greatly,’ he answered. ‘So I couldn’t say.’

‘But what are you doing in Syria?’

‘If you ask yourself the same question, Mr. Amberson, I think—if I am any judge of men—that you will find the answer for both of us.’

A little puzzled, I replied that I was in the country to stay, and that the life of a Christian Arab with a moderate income would very well content me.

‘It would, eh? In other words you prefer the peace of exile to anything that our poor Europe has to offer. Believe me, impatience and disgust have built more empires than any love of
country.’

Osterling showed me round the colony, but did most of the questioning himself—as if his sightseeing tour of my character must necessarily be of far more interest to both of us than bricks
and mortar. I fear it was. I couldn’t be proof against such a compliment from such a companion. He may have been suspicious of the motives behind my visit, or perhaps this curiosity had been
aroused by Elisa. She had evidently talked about me, though, probably impressed more by my way of living than myself. He wouldn’t hear of my leaving before she returned, pressed me to stay
the night and left me at the very comfortable guest bungalow half-way down the colony.

An hour later I went across to the common-room where any of the colonists who wished gathered at the end of the day. Thirty or forty men and women were standing or sitting in easy groups around
the bottles and the glasses. The odd mixture of faces, some conventionally well-bred, some markedly prole­tarian, suggested a political club. The room had its original red-tiled floor and
whitewashed walls upon which were hung four ancient Kashan rugs, each like a mosaic of jewels set in golden borders, and a few gay, light landscapes painted by one of the colonists.

Elisa Cantemir came forward to greet me. After introducing me to a number of her companions, whose names seemed to hail from all over Europe, she played the hostess and apologized for having
nothing but local drinks. I assured her, with what must have been obvious sincerity, that Syria produced all a man could want—unless he were indissolubly wedded to whisky and
vintages—and a lot of peculiar flavours that he wouldn’t find elsewhere. She immediately asked me to overhaul their cellar and stock it for them. It was extraordinary how she guessed
that to me, as a Syrian bon viveur, it would be a labour of love. She didn’t for a moment mean that I should be their wine merchant.

Because she now had the full reality of a woman in her own chosen setting, I appreciated her, physically, for the first time. She was tall and very thin—though of a thinness that was
feminine and tense. I cannot call her slim; the word implies a softness of outline that Elisa had not. She was almost angular, but every one of her angles was delicate and exciting. Her head was
small, and her mouth, which was the natural colour of an autumn leaf, was wide and mobile. She had about her an aromatic bitterness that was in sharp contrast to the purposeful benevolence of the
general run of colonists.

In the dining-room she placed me next to her. There was nothing monastic about the seating arrangements, no main table self-consciously round or with awkward top and bottom. The colonists helped
themselves from hatches and sideboards, and pulled tables together if any group of them wanted to continue a conversation begun in the ante-room. The talk which I over­heard was mostly in
English—by general consent the common language of the colony. Where national parties were sitting together, one heard a good deal of German and the Slav tongues.

Besides Elisa, Osterling and myself, there were two others at our table. One was a handsome and spectacled American called Lois Tassen; she was a journalist and something of a political
philosopher, formidably cynical and well-informed. The other was Eugen Rosa, the familiar spirit whom after that evening I never saw again, alive or dead.

I began to feel that Kasr-el-Sittat was not so predictable an organization as I had imagined, and I confined my questions to those a mere sightseer would be expected to ask. Elisa, how­ever,
satisfied my unspoken curiosity with a frankness that seemed harsh. Or was harshness my early impression of that incisive voice? It had the quality of a cello in the hands of some too resolute but
brilliant player.

Her companions, she told me, had been gathered together by friend choosing friend, by letter, by justifiable blackmail of staffs in charge of displaced persons, by bribery of frontier police and
passport officials; and the general scheme of the colony had been conceived by a group of refugees at Istanbul, whose lives and capital were safe in Turkey. It was to Turkey, she said, that so many
victims of our modern states had escaped. She seemed to lump all governments together as equally damnable, and equally capable, given the power, of Nazi-Communist methods.

In my heart I agreed with her, but I protested the platitude that the world had known nothing like the mass murders com­mitted by Russian and German oligarchs since Tamerlane and his piles
of skulls. She positively scolded me for shallow think­ing. Her leaf-fine nostrils, which were never wholly at rest, quivered with impatience. She held up Tamerlane as a bene­factor
compared to his modern successors; he had merely destroyed the organization of states; he had not taken the slight­est interest in the regimentation of individuals. Where Tamerlane had passed
there was less government, and more freedom for those who remained.

‘Is there a single citizen of the civilized world,’ she asked, ‘who does not bitterly resent the interference of the State with his daily life, even if he knows he must accept
it?’

Her evident interest in my opinions made me feel that her vehemence was exciting rather than discourteous.

‘Not one,’ I answered, ‘except convinced communists.’

‘Oh, I leave out the governing classes!’ Elisa exclaimed. ‘To interfere is their livelihood. Among all the charlatans of state, communists are only the most
conceited.’

‘What are your politics, Mr. Amberson?’ Lois Tassen asked, fixing me with an efficient and patronizing eye.

I told her that I admired politicians too greatly to have any.

At that she went up in the air. She assumed, I suppose, that I was a hero-worshipper, and nothing is more exasperating to the journalist than that—at any rate in private.

‘If you won’t be bored by a perfectly true anecdote,’ I said, ‘I think I can explain.’

And I told them how, during the Abyssinian campaign, a six-ton lorry broke down on a lonely road. The rocks were full of baboons, and they climbed down and sat in a circle to watch the driver
and his mate tinker with the engine. Those two poor devils couldn’t get it started, and had to walk ten miles to the nearest vehicle aid post. When they got back with a mechanic and a
breakdown truck, they found that the baboons had mastered the use of that fascinating toy, the spanner, and were unscrewing the lorry nut by nut.

‘What’s more, they went on unscrewing,’ I said. ‘It would have cost a man’s life to stop them. Well, my sympathy is with the baboons. I am amazed at their
cleverness, their willingness to learn.’

Osterling was delighted.

‘What a pity that politicians have not blue bottoms,’ he exclaimed, ‘so that we could recognize them at birth!’

Elisa, however, saw that my story was no paradox, but a sincere expression of my own personal attempt to adjust myself to my world.

‘You are very English,’ she said. ‘You can forgive because you have such a genius for contempt.’

‘Isn’t forgiveness common at Kasr-el-Sittat?’

‘Towards everything,’ she answered, ‘except the State.’

‘You are anarchists?’

Elisa hesitated. Her eyes were brilliantly alive and very tired. Even then, I think, she was beginning to have plans for me and did not wish me to be frightened by a name.

‘Philosophically,’ said Eugen Rosa in the inflectionless voice of a man who had learned English perfectly, but seldom used it, ‘philosophically, I question it. It is not
necessarily anarchism to hold the individual above the State, to care—shall I say?—for his worth rather than his well-being.’

‘It is even the essence of Christianity,’ Elisa agreed ironically, as if that tremendous interpretation of the world deserved to be considered only as a parallel creed. ‘And
here too religion will keep creeping in.’

3

When next morning I continued a leisurely journey through the tobacco villages and on to Aleppo, I found that the sur­rounding inhabitants shared—with due allowance made for Arab
imagination—my own vision of Kasr-el-Sittat. They suspected that on that site and in so deliberately isolated a com­munity there must be a fanatical religion; and, on the plane of everyday
life, they felt the impact and influence of a highly organized reality.

I dared not pass the house of a friend without entering in—for he would have heard of my movements and be offended—and so, patiently obeying the conventions of my adopted land, I had
coffee with two village headmen, a snack with a harness-maker and a very late lunch with a local notable. The mention that I had spent a night at Kasr-el-Sittat invariably produced a nervous
silence, and then a spate of exaggerated praise. There was little serious comment, even from men who had actually been employed on the estate.

The colonists were popular, for they paid good wages and looked after their people; but it was no secret that large sub­ventions paid to influential Syrians accounted for permission to buy
Kasr-el-Sittat, and their subsequent freedom from any government interference. The inhabitants of the valleys, who were used to naked power and had learned to walk delicately, were well aware that
town officials might with every excuse pretend to be ignorant of what went on in so remote a district, and that the colony, if it wished, could be as arbitrary as their late and not much lamented
God. They did not care to discuss such unbounded possibilities.