The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

Please help. It will be a book about peaceful life, about the village. An anti-war book. Bitter Rice. The book that Robert Capa never made.

      Stephen demurs. He thinks Konstantin is being naïve, but does not like to say so. He can hardly plead over-occupation as an excuse, as he has already lingered in the soft beds of the East for seven times seven nights with nothing to show for his sojourn but scribbles and sketches. But he does not like the idea of a picture book. He does not want to write the text for a book of glossy photographs of tragic people, even if the photographs are taken by his charming new friend. He has already turned down many offers to write texts and introductions to non-books. When he won the Booker, such requests had flooded in, and he had agreed, feebly, to write a foreword to an architectural guide to Paris Métro stations. This he had much regretted.

      He regrets too that Konstantin has suggested something as banal as a book. Surely he should be above such things? He needs Konstantin to be the spiritual hero, not the cobbler-together of objects to put on Miss Porntip’s glass-topped coffee table.

      He protests that he is not good at that kind of thing. He is an old-fashioned book person. Konstantin, the man with the camera, is the man of the future, the coming man. Why does he not write his own text?

      Konstantin shrugs and smiles disarmingly and says he cannot write. He says to Stephen, I write like you draw. Stephen laughs. But does not give a firm assent. They will go along together to the border, he agrees, and they will see what happens. Jack Crane will give them a lift to Aranyaprathet in the ICRDP van.

      Stephen continues to wish that Konstantin had not stooped to a commercial proposition, although he continues to be flattered by his attention. For some reason, he wishes Konstantin to remain beyond reproach and pure in heart. He tries to quell his doubts about photojournalism. Why, as a trade, should it be any worse than his own? Is he himself, hanging around on the edge of events, a parasite, a maggot on dying flesh, is he himself beyond reproach?

      Sean Flynn and Tim Page, in the Vietnam war, experimented with a camera that could be attached to a soldier’s rifle so that when the gun was fired, it automatically recorded the death of its victim.

      Sean Flynn vanished in Cambodia. He drove off, Easy Rider, on his Honda, and was never seen again. He left a legend, but no bones. Maybe he is still alive.

      Konstantin insists that he is not a war photographer. I photograph survivors, he tells Stephen. I photograph life, not death. Stephen wonders if this is so. If it is possible.

      Stephen, sitting in the Bangkok Press Club on the twentieth floor of a luxury hotel, sips a candiola juice, and sinks back into his deep armchair. He is evading the choice between Konstantin and Miss Porntip, between the light and the dark. He is reading a copy of Asia Today which informs him that most of Asia has leaped straight from illiteracy to the Visual Display Unit and has cut out the need for books. Stephen is a member of a threatened species. He is unnecessary. He reads that ‘Peasants in remote hill villages who have never mastered the art of reading and writing are quite at home with the electronic revolution. They have bypassed Gutenberg.’ He gazes at these words with incredulity. What fantasy world is this? Where do they find the electricity, in these remote hill villages? Do they all have their own generators? Are they not always in danger of storm or flood or guerrilla warfare or opium armies? Back home in the UK, in Good Time, Stephen has friends who have lost whole screenplays, whole novels, whole treatises on Wittgenstein into the unreachable limbo of their machinery. Are the hill peasants really that much smarter than his friends in Oxford and NW5?

      Well, of course, judging by Miss Porntip, they may well be.

      But what do they use their computers for, up there in the hills? Are they calculating the yield per acre of garlic versus cabbage, the profits of King Prawn versus Queen Porn, or are they rewriting the Tragedy of the Ravished Maiden?

      It is the quiet hour, l’heure verte, when the spirit sinks. Other solitary figures slump in the gloom. Television screens flicker, and there is a hum of fax and telex. Stephen still writes with pen and ink, with pencil, with ball-point pen. The electronic revolution may or may not have reached Miss Porntip’s village, but it has certainly reached the Press Club of Bangkok.

      The Khmer Rouge dispensed with the new technologies. They returned to people power, to bare hands.

      Angkor had not been built, as the text books claim, by Suryavarman or Jayavarman or Indravarman or Hashavarman or any other Varman. It had been built by the bare hands of slave labour. By despised mountain people, nameless, known to history only as ‘Dog’, ‘Cat’, ‘Detestable’, ‘Loathsome’ and ‘Stinking Beast’. They had laboured and they had died. (Or this is what Stephen, erroneously, thinks, but his sixties’ Marxist scholarship is out of date: Dog and Cat had been in fact, we now believe, quite privileged people, whose pet names were perhaps adopted to ward off the evil eye. The true slaves remain – well, yet more deeply nameless and undistinguished.)

      Democratic Kampuchea had not been built by willing patriots, by workers toiling to create a shared vision. It had been built by Dog Doctor, by Cat Teacher, by Rat Banker, by Detestable Clerk. They too had laboured and died, and no revisionist historian has yet rewritten their fate. The evil eye had beamed full upon them. Stephen Cox finds this disappointing. Who now will rebuild? No aid reaches Vietnam, no aid reaches Kampuchea. The Vietnamese cry out for American dollars. They are starving. They will withdraw from Kampuchea if aid is promised. They have had enough of proudly eating stones.

      Over Stephen’s head dangles a TV monitor, relaying American newsreel of another explosion in Beirut, an explosion that cameramen have risked their lives to film. It is followed in rapid psychedelic succession by photographs of an adopted child in Denver, bruised and battered by its middle-class parents: by famine in Mozambique: by a report of a new method of making calorie-free cream cakes.

      Stephen is depressed. The green hour is very green. He sinks into its subaqueous wash. He is about to go under. Who will save him? And suddenly, there before him, smiling and extending a hand, is Simon Grunewald, ethnologist, homosexual and adventurer, exclaiming with his habitual eagerness, ‘Stephen! I say, Stephen, is that really you? What luck!’ Stephen knows that he is, if not saved, reprieved.

      *

      Liz Headleand was invited to be one of the witnesses at the marriage of Esther Breuer and Robert Oxenholme. The marriage had followed quickly upon the limousine declaration. Robert, that night, had repeated his offer, and Esther had said, ‘Yes.’ Just the one word, ‘Yes.’ It had hopped out from her mouth, unexpectedly, like a toad or a diamond.