Nevertheless, Susan gives him the advice he clearly needs, not duck, the prawns are better, no, no, that chicken concoction is for dull palates.
The waiter is already swaying servilely this way and that with a discreet offer of the dessert menu; some of us have done with the main spread. Maybe we’re ready for what I remember comes next in this place which is just as it was, the trolleys of bounty will never empty. Fortune cookies. Sorbet with litchis; mangoes? Perhaps it’s the names of tropical fruits that remind us of Anthony’s form of dress. ‘What are you up to?’ It’s Edward. ‘Whose international corporate anatomy are you dissecting.’ As if the African robe must be some kind of journalist surgeon’s operating garb. Oracular Edward recalls, ‘Who would have foreseen even the most powerful in the world come to fear of running dry — except you, of course, when you wrote your Seven Sisters… that was…’ The readers of his book about the oil industry, the writer himself, ignore reference to the memory museum, its temporal documentation. ‘Who foresaw it was those oilfields witches’ brew that fuels the world which was going to be more pricey than gold, platinum, uranium, yes! — Yes! — in terms of military strategy for power, the violent grab for spheres of supply, never mind political influence. Who saw it was going to be guns for oil, blood for oil. You did!’
I don’t know at what stage the continuing oil crisis exists in the awareness of the Chinese restaurant Empyrean.
Anthony is shrugging and laughing embarrassedly under an accolade. Now — forever — he’s proved prophet but there’s only the British tribe’s understatement, coming from him. ‘Anybody could have known it.’
Susan takes up with her flourish, Edward’s imagery. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble, the cauldron that received what gushed from earth and seabed? They didn’t.’
Edward and Susan enjoy Sampson’s modesty, urging him on.
‘Well, if the book should — could — might have been somehow…’ Dismissing bent tilt of head.
Of course, who knows if hindsight’s seeing it reprinted, best-selling. There’s no use for royalties anyway. No tariff for the Chinese lunch.
Now it’s Susan who presses. ‘So what’re you up to.’
Maybe he’s counting that Mandela will arrive soon, so he can add an afterword to his famous biography of the great man.
‘Oh it’d be good to see you sometime at the tavern.’
Tavern?
Probably I’m the only one other than Sampson himself who knows that’s the South African politically correct term for what used to be black ghetto shebeens (old term second-hand from the Irish).
Susan turns down her beautiful mouth generously shaped for disbelief and looks to Edward. The wells of his gaze send back from depths, reflection of shared intrigue.
Anthony Sampson has some sort of bar.
Did he add ‘my place’—that attractive British secretive mumble always half-audible. So that would explain the African dress. And yet make it more of a mystery to us (if, the dreamer, I’m not one of those summoned up, can be included in the dream).
‘How long has this place been going?’ Susan again.
Where?
Where isn’t relevant. There’s no site, just as with the Chinese restaurant conjured up by Susan’s expectation of her arrival. (Couldn’t have been a place of my expectation of you.)
How long?
The African garment isn’t merely a comfortable choice for what might have been anticipated as an overheated New York — style restaurant. It is a ritual accoutrement, a professional robe. Anthony Sampson has spent some special kind of attention, since there is no measure by time, in induction as a sangoma.
Sangoma. What. What is that.
I know it’s what’s commonly understood as a ‘witch doctor’, but that’s an imperio-colonialist term neither of Anthony’s companions would want to use, particularly not Edward, whose classic work Orientalism is certainly still running into many editions as evidence of the avatars of the old power phenomenon in guise under new names.
Sampson’s ‘place’ is a shebeen which was part of his place in Africa that was never vacated by him when he went back to England, as the Chinese restaurant is part of her place, never vacated in Susan’s New York. But the shebeen seems put to a different purpose; or rather carries in its transformation what really had existed there already. Sampson’s not one in a crowd and huddle that always made itself heard above the music in ‘The House of Truth’—ah, that was the name in the Sophia-town ‘slum’ of the white city, poetic in such claims for its venues. He’s not just one of the swallowers of a Big Mama’s concoction of beer-brandy-brakefluid, Godknowswhat, listening to, entering the joys, sorrows, moods defiant and despairing, brazenly alive, of men and women who made him a brother there.
He has returned to this, to something of the world, from isolation in the bush of Somenowhere with knowledge to offer instead of, as bar proprietor, free drinks. The knowledge of the traditional healer. He serves the sangoma’s diagnoses of and alleviations of the sorrows, defiances and despairs that can’t be drowned or danced, sung away together.
‘Oh a shrink!’
Who would have thought Susan, savant of many variations of cultures, could be so amazed. The impact throws back her splendid head in laughter.
At ‘Tony’s Place’, his extraordinary gifts as a journalist elevated to another sphere of inquiry, he guides with the third eye his bar patrons — wait a minute; his patients — to go after what’s behind their presented motives of other people, and what’s harmful behind the patient’s own. He dismisses: doesn’t make love potions. Hate potions to sprinkle, deadly, round a rival’s house? That’s witch doctor magic, not healing. The patrons, beer in hand, talk to him, talk out the inner self. As he reluctantly continues to recount, he says that he observes their body language, he gathers what lies unconfessed between the words. No. He doesn’t tell them what to do, dictate a solution to confound, destroy the enemy, he directs them to deal with themselves.
‘A psychotherapist! Oh of course, that’s it. Dear Anthony!’ He’s proved psychotherapy was first practised in ancient Africa, like so many Western ‘discoveries’ claimed by the rest of the world. Susan puts an arm round his shoulders to recognise him as an original.
And aren’t they, all three. How shall we do without them? They’re drifting away, they’re leaving the table, I hear in the archive of my head broken lines from adolescent reading, an example that fits Edward’s definition of Western orientalism, some European’s version of the work of an ancient Persian poet. It’s not the bit about the jug of wine and thou. ‘… Some we loved, the loveliest and the best… Have drunk their cup a round or two before / And one by one crept silently to rest.’ Alone in the Chinese restaurant, it comes to me not as exotic romanticism but as the departure of the three guests.
I sat at the table, you didn’t turn up, too late.
You will not come. Never.
a frivolous woman
WHEN she died they found in an old cabin trunk elaborate as a pirate’s chest a variety of masquerade costumes, two sequinned masks, and folders protecting dinner menus flourished with witty drawings dedicated by the artists.
She had brought the treasure trove from Berlin as a refugee from Nazi extermination of Jewish Germans. She left behind, dispossessed of, the fine house where the dinners were given, the guests famous opera singers, orchestra conductors, painters, art collectors and Weimar Republic politicians — Walter Rathenau, the Liberal last Minister of Foreign Affairs in that government, a regular at table, had been assassinated by Right Wing radicals.