“What was his name?”
“Cave, I think. John Cave.”
“A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent.” Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that this was to be Clarissa’s plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris’s own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf’s fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor’s chisel.
Two
1
I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips ... this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa’s comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also ...
It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I’ve heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.
I tried to continue with my writing but it was impossible: I could recall nothing. My attention would not focus on the past, on those wraiths which have lately begun to assume again such startling reality as I go about the work of memory ... but the past was lost to me this morning. The doors shut and I was marooned in the meager present.
Who was this American who had come to Luxor? and why?