We plunge right away into our customary eager exchange of interpretations of political events, international powermongering, national religious and secular conflicts, the obsessional scaffolding of human existence on earth, then ready to turn to personal preoccupations, for which, instinctively selected in each friendship, there is a different level of confidences. Before we get to ours, someone else arrives at our table; even I, who have known that face in its changes over many years and in relation to many scenes and circumstances, from treason trials in the country where I am still one of the living, to all-night parties in London, don’t recognise his entry. Once standing at this table, the face creased in his British laugh of greeting: it’s Anthony Sampson. Who? Because instead of the baggy pants unworthy of tweed jacket, he’s wearing an African robe. Not just a dashiki shirt he might have picked up on his times in Africa, and donned for comfortable summer informality of whatever this gathering is, but a robe to the ankles — by the way, it can’t be hot in the Chinese restaurant; there’s no climate in dream. When he was editor of a black-staffed newspaper in South Africa and belonged, was an intimate of shebeen ghettos, never mind his pink British skin, this preceded the era when African garb became fashionable as a mark of the wearer’s non-racism. Sampson had no interest in being fashionable within any convention. He showed no consciousness, now, of his flowing robe. So neither did I; nor did Edward though I suppose they had met in the Elsewhere. Edward rose while Anthony and I hugged, kissed on either cheek, he greeted Edward with recollected — it seemed — admiration and chose a chair, having to arrange the robe out of the way of his shoes, like a skirt.
We took up, three of us now, the interrupted talk of political conflict and scandals, policies and ideologies, corrupt governments, tyrant fundamentalists, homegrown in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and those created by the hubris of the West. A waiter subserviently intruded with distributed menus but we all ignored him as if it were understood we were waiting for someone. I was waiting for you. Even in that Chinese restaurant though it was never your favourite cuisine.
Whom were we waiting for?
I wonder now, awakened in bed by a heavy cat settling on my feet, but I didn’t then, no-one asked me so I didn’t have to give my answer: you. Edward opened a menu big and leather-bound as a book of world maps. Perhaps this meant he and Anthony knew no-one was coming. No-one else was available among the dead in their circle. Maybe the too newly-dead cannot enter dreams. But no; Anthony was recent, and here he was, if strangely got up in the category of the childhood belief that when you die you grow wings, become angels in the Empyrean.
Suddenly she was there, sitting at the head of the table as if she had been with us all along or because there was no time we hadn’t remarked when it was she’d joined us. Susan. Susan Sontag. How to have missed the doorway entrance of that presence always larger-than-life (stupid metaphor to have chosen in the circumstances, but this is a morning-after account) not only in sense of her height and size: a mythical goddess, Athena-Medea statue with that magnificent head of black hair asserting this doubling authority, at once inspiring, menacing, unveiling a sculptor’s bold marble features, gouged by commanding eyes.
It seemed there had been greetings. Exclamations of pleasure, embraces and less intimate but just as sincere pressures of hands left animation, everyone talking at once across one another. Susan’s deep beautiful voice interrupted itself in an aside to call a waiter by name — well of course, so this is the Chinese restaurant in New York’s SoHo she used to take me to! The waiters know her, she’s the habituée who judges what’s particularly good to order, in fact she countermands with an affectionate gesture of a fine hand the hesitant choices of the others and questions, insists, laughs reprovingly at some of the waiter’s suggestions; he surely is aware of what the cooks can’t get away with, with her. She does let us decide on what to drink. Susan was never a drinker and this one among her favourite eating places probably doesn’t have a cellar of the standard that holds the special French and Italian cultivars for which she makes an exception.
As if, non-smoker, she carries a box of matches, there strikes from her a flame flaring the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The light’s turned on Edward, naturally, although this is not a group in which each sees personal identity and its supposed unquestioning loyalty cast by birth, faith, country, race, as the decisive and immutable sum of self. Edward is a Palestinian, he’s also in his ethics of human being, a Jew, we know that from his writings, his exposure of the orientalism within us, the invention of the Other that’s survived the end of the old-style colonialism into globalisation. If Susan’s a Jew, she too, has identity beyond that label, hers has been one with Vietnamese, Sarajevans, many others, to make up the sum of self.
They carry all this to the Somenowhere. In the Chinese restaurant, there between us.
Sampson doesn’t interject much in that understated rapidity of half-audible upperclass English delivery, yet gives a new twist to what’s emerging from the other two eloquently contesting one another from different points of view even on what they agree upon. A journalist who’s achieved distinction of complete integrity in venturous success must have begun by being a good listener. And I — my opinions and judgments are way down in the confusion of living, I don’t have the perspective the dead must have attained. But the distance with which Edward seems to regard Susan’s insistent return to passionate views of opposing legitimacies between Palestinians and Israelis is puzzling. After all his clarity and commitment on that conflict-trampled ground of the earth he’s left behind, searching the unambiguous words and taking the actions for a just resolution (on the premise there is one), putting his brilliant mind to it against every hostility, including the last — death: how this lack of response? Lassitude? Is that the peace of the dead that passeth all understanding the public relations spin doctors of religions advertise? The hype by one to counter that other, a gratis supply of virgins? Lassitude. But Edward Said: never an inactive cell in that unique brain.
‘What did you leave unfinished?’
The favoured waiter had wheeled to the table a double-deck buffet almost the table’s length, displaying a composition of glistening mounds, gardens of bristling greens. Susan with her never sated search for truth rather than being fobbed off with information, dared to introduce as she turned to the food’s array, a subject it perhaps isn’t done to raise among the other guests.
She was helping herself with critical concentration, this, no, then that — and some more of that — filling to her satisfaction, aesthetic and anticipatory, the large plates the restaurant earned its reputation by providing.