Gestures Paperback - 2002

Excerpt

Publisher's Note

It was H.S. Bhabra’s expressed wish that Gestures be re-published under the title Faust. This had been his preferred title when the book was first published in 1986, but his publishers at the time were not persuaded, and the novel appeared under the alternative title that he himself had proposed: Gestures.

Although it is clear that he would have liked the title to be changed for this edition, there are at least two factors that weigh heavily against such a change: the bibliographic confusion whenever a title is changed, and the sense of loss amongst those who have come to love the book under its original title. So Gestures it remains.


Part One

The Horses of the Sun
Venice, 1923

"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?"

This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.”

He laughed, and fell into the Grand Canal.

That is how I first remember him, though it cannot have been the first time that we met, in Venice, over sixty years ago, translated in air from earth to water, himself the salamander, all fire. That is the first betrayal, the inadequate treason which is memory. I have always envied those who can remember how they met, and when, and where. I have always found myself in the middle before I knew I had begun.

So it begins again. I had intended -- what had I intended? An account, a memoir, even, perhaps an apologia. Something, certainly, which one day my grandson, my youngest grandson, might turn to from simple interest or complex curiosity, to discover how we lived then, we impossibly old people of whom I am the last decrepit survivor, in those inconceivable days when we were young and the world was ours for the re-making. I should know better, I suppose; I whose life has been spent in paper -- minutes, accords, agreements, protocols and plans -- all the instruments of the forgotten or superseded sport of diplomacy, as out of date as five-day cricket and courtesy. I have lived amongst studiedly useful, practical words, and I know how short their life is, shorter now than ever, and I would not know how to aspire, utilitarian that I am, to the unlikely immortality of art.

So how is it that, as soon as I sat down to write, I found myself remembering one who played only a little part in my life, whose troubles were none of mine, and from whom, I believe, I learnt nothing, nothing at all, nothing of any use? It is another way in which the memory of the very old betrays them, yet not, perhaps, without a purpose after all. At my age we remember, and I write, at least as much to interest ourselves as in any hope of interesting others, for curiosity is the only one of our powers which is not bitterly diminished by time, and its shabby promptings may urge my ageing flesh to go on living yet a while; and he was an interesting man.

I should, however, make some attempt to begin at the beginning, for I am an Englishman of the upper middle class, which is to say I am one of the most complete creatures of convention the infinitely various human race has so far succeeded in producing. If I have any prototype for the kind of book I am trying to write it is the first book I can remember reading -- The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. These papers will constitute The Memoirs of an Ordinary Man.

My name is Jeremy Burnham, and I was born in the county of Worcester in England with the century. (Let us clear this up at once; whatever plenary sessions of international commissions may have said, the century and I both began on the first day of January, 1901, and as I write this I am exactly eighty-three years and three months old.) My people, without being important or ostentatious, lived the sort of life of which the slavering, slack-jawed television audience of today can only dream. I remember a vast red-brick house (I know that everything seems larger to the young, but it was big enough to be sold to the local education authority in the 1950s to serve as an art-college -- whatever that is) full of silent servants and loud-mouthed dogs. My father was a gentleman, which means only that he did not need to trouble himself with anything so vulgar as work, for an ancestor had developed a celebrated proprietary treatment for colic and those other ailments of the bowel with which the nineteenth century seems to have been plagued. The rights in this particular opiate had been sold many years before, so nothing as distasteful as industry or medicine survived to stain our escutcheon, only money. My mother’s people were miscellaneous landowners, though her own parents introduced an unfortunate touch of the clergy. Happily, my grandfather redeemed himself by ending his days as bishop of one of our more acceptable dioceses.

Looking back on those early years of the century, my dominant memory is not of the unbridled heat which has washed over the playing fields and parks of England in popular fiction as in fact, but of stiffness. Everyone I knew, but especially the adults, seemed to be encased in starch, and to this day I remember my mother as a sound: the stiff brocaded rustle of her skirts comes back to me unasked for, as does the splendid gleam of my father’s collar in the otherwise unadorned gloom of his study or the smoking-room.

I was the fifth of six children and was put through the customary education of my class. In childhood I was brought up by nannies, which in my case meant being locked away in the children’s quarters with a string of bestial Irishwomen, until at the age of eight I was packed off to that ten-year cycle at public schools whereby the English avoid their children in their most unspeakable years, to have them returned only when they have achieved some kind of maturity and the makings of possible companions. Even in my youth it was usual to speak of the unrelieved horror of one’s schooldays and, to be sure, for anyone except gentlemen the conditions would often have been intolerable -- a combination of cold, physical exercise, scarcely credible food, unrelieved sadism and moral blackmail reminiscent of nothing so much as a Soviet psychiatric hospital for political offenders or a progressive Chinese prison -- but I cannot say I was aware of any great unhappiness or that I suffered particularly from being beaten into that localised form of insensibility the English teaching profession deems appropriate to the parsing of a Latin sentence or the scanning of a Greek metron.

The Great War formed the background to my last four years at school, and though I can only look back now with complete contempt at the old fools, young shirkers and ignorant clergymen who read the rolls of the school dead each Sunday and exhorted us to do our duty and commit ourselves to a life of service each morning, I am equally glad that the accident of age kept me secure in the pieties of that antiquated community, whilst my two elder brothers were mashed into the blood and mud of Ypres and the Argonne. (Tom, the second of them, still comes back to me sometimes in dreams, still nineteen, still the tall blond innocent ruffian of my schooldays, and down the long corridor of time, four times older now than he was ever to be, I find myself unable to speak, unable to say some small word of comfort that what they saw and did was not in vain, until he fades, whistling, as he used to when going in to bat, and I am left with an inconsolable ache and only the sorry satisfaction that he did not live to see the destruction the guns of August wreaked on the world of our childhood and the way the rest of us fouled what remained.)

Media reviews

"A first novel of unusual sophistication and complexity." -- Robertson Davies

"Bhabra pulls off this feat of make-believe with such stunning conviction and aplomb that we're tempted to believe in reincarnation. It is, in short, a virtuoso performance, particularly for a first novel... Bhabra writes with remarkable urbanity, wisdom and sophistication... Gestures is that rare creation -- a provocative, intelligent novel with an almost perfect balance between ideas and action." -- The Globe and Mail

"A poignant tale of betrayal and corruption." -- Susan Swan

"The most impressive quality of Gestures is a patient, muscular seriousness that dares to dive to the depths of human experience: the book has the density and sonorousness of real art." -- Maclean's


"What is extraordinary about Gestures, besides its sheer readability, is that rich mix of urbane wit and sardonic commentary on the human condition -- The portrait of evil in a world of crisis and rendered from exceptionally close focus, frighteningly so." -- William Wiser, author of Disappearances

"To read Gestures is to be absorbed into a world so authentic, so fully summoned, so delicately shaded with personality and event, that one's own world quickly pales. It is a subtle and elegant novel, pulsing with intelligence. As all great stories do, it has the possibility of altering the ways in which we see the world." -- Neil Bissoondath