The Laughter of Carthage: Pyat Quartet

by Michael Moorcock

  We should ride in machines of gold and brass and blinding silver and our enemies would know the helpless thrill of absolute terror. We should take our vengeance, but we should take it honourably. Wake up, America! Your skies fill with an avenging army and only the just shall survive! The first phase of my Kampfzeit had drawn to a close. The second would soon begin. Meanwhile, as a simple, strolling player, I would mingle with the ordinary people, drawing my strength from the grassroots, the backbone of America. I had flown too high, too soon, through no fault of my own. Now I must restore myself, plant my boots firmly on the ground and begin again. You would not hear my voice whining Amerika! Twoje dzielo. Our little band would grow, but not by many, and I would continue to remain true to my ideals. For a while, however, they would have to be adapted to the requirements of the musical comedy. Erst waren es Sieben. Sie kämpften und blutetan für Amerikas Freiheit.

  Mrs Cornelius had bought an old Cadillac ambulance for a song. Slightly refitted, with the name of our Company painted in the latest modernistic lettering on her sides, the machine was a bargain. Mrs Cornelius and the other two girls were all that remained of the original troupe, but she was confident we should swell the ranks back to seven by recruiting as we travelled. They had bought material and made new costumes, some of which would be for the new sketch I had outlined to Mrs Cornelius as my first contribution. Within a very short time we were ready to begin our northward journey along the Pacific Coast. I was excited, of course, but also more than usually nervous, uncertain of my abilities as an actor-manager. Mrs Cornelius constantly reassured me that it was ‘a piece of cake’ and ‘far easier than it looks’. Nonetheless, I twice came close to giving the idea up and taking the first tramp to Tahiti.

  Eventually I rallied. I wrote further letters to Esmé, to Kolya and one to Santucci, thanking him for his help. I told them all I could be reached in care of the Ristorante Venezia, Taylor Street. I had given up politics because I was disgusted with the corruption I had discovered. Eventually I planned to resume my scientific career.

  I should not have delayed as long as I did. Coming out of Goldberg’s on my way to meet Mrs Cornelius, who already had my suitcase packed in the back of the van, I saw Brodmann - or rather his leather coat - slip from view round the corner of the bakery across the street. I ran after him but he was already flying down the pavement to disappear below the horizon. I could not decide why he should go to such pains to avoid recognition. There was no telling what complicated game he was playing with his allies as well as his quarry. Rather than go directly to where I had told Mrs Cornelius to pick me up, I took a series of sidetracks, moving in and out of alleys doubling back on myself, and so arrived outside the little Dupont Street drugstore rather later than I had said. Everyone else was ready in the van. The two girls sat behind while Mrs Cornelius, a little drunk, waited in the seat beside mine. The engine was started and we were, in her words, ‘ready to roll’. With a great sigh of relief I let off the brake, engaged the gears and began the labouring journey towards Market Street. The van had an excellent engine for its age, but was somewhat overloaded. Mrs Cornelius was full of her old exuberance, leading the other girls and myself in the choruses of her favourite songs.

  By the time we were on the road to Salinas we had sung our way through most of her repertoire and I was teaching her My Old Kentucky Moon which I had learned only a month earlier from the treacherous Mrs Mawgan. Occasionally I would glance back the way we had come, but saw no driver resembling Brodmann. I was childishly happy to be with her again and travelling. Es dir oys s’harts! I could put the past entirely from my mind and concentrate cheerfully upon the future. I kissed her cheek affectionately.

  Mrs Cornelius giggled. ‘You’ll do, Ivan. We’re on our way ter Glory, mate!’ A moment later, with an astonished groan, she threw up in my lap.

  * * * *

  TWENTY

  I COULD NOT GO BACK to Odessa. Even if it were possible, what would I find? A rationalised corpse; a poor reproduction? Nothing is left of my cities. All that remained was a future: now even that is denied me, for Carthage laid waste its foundations. The present is obscene. What do they expect me to make of it? Those lost cities: those stillborn marvels! I offered the solution. They rejected it. Surely the Jew in Arcadia did not betray me? I loved him. The metal was introduced out there, while I lay helpless against their synagogue. I choose who is and who is not a Jew: I choose the way to a safer, ordered world. I choose to say what is fact and what is fiction. Dissatisfied with mere victory, Carthage made war on my dreams.

  Carthage came marching against Byzantium. I fought. I drove the enemy back. My dreams soared again. No little black hands clung to my anchor lines. No mocking nigger eyes traded on my guilt. What reason I should feel guilty? I have done something with myself. I am an engineer of long experience.

  For all that year and the one which followed Carthage hid her masts behind the horizon. How could I know she still pursued us? I journeyed into a world of illusions. I cannot say I regret it. Indeed, I would dearly love to see the fantasy restored. Reality is not in itself valuable. But I did not know that. Those Nazis were barbarians. Like the Bolsheviks before them, they were willing recruits in the infantry of Carthage. They called Hitler their ‘new Alexander’. What cities did they leave in their wake? What enduring monuments? Sachsenhausen? Buchenwald? Dachau? Twelve million slaughtered lagervolk (50% Jewish, 50% Slav); another twenty million miscellaneous cadavers and a crude rocket? What did Speer build which lasted just fifteen years? Even Turks showed respect for Constantinople, albeit by imitation. Carthage creates only ash and mud, mixes these together, moulds the result on frames of twisted barbed wire, then hails the result, these shambling grotesques, as the Obermenschen of their impoverished mythology. Today I have no time for self-professed enemies of Carthage. They are too easily seduced. My Baroness von Ruckstühl was killed in Berlin. That city was never the best refuge for a philosemitic Slav, yet it was a Russian bomb which took her life. Stalin’s answer to a problem was the simplest of all. If it could not be quickly solved, he destroyed it. Nit problem. This is fundamental to the philosophy of Carthage. I fail to understand this Liebschaft mit der Nazi. Er verfluchte die Zukunft. Er verlachte den Amerikaner. Er lachte laut! But was ist Amerika und seiner Venegurung in kontrast? Es ist kornish! Der Nazi er eine Wille to self-destruction has in stronger form. Um so besser. Begreifen sie das Problem? These daytsh broynfel lombard-tseshterniks are no better than Bolsheviks, concerned with the same silly sport. Auschwitz? Treblinka? Babi Yar? I offered them a sky-borne Alexandria! Always in sunshine. Always warm.

  I claim only novelty as the explanation for any success we achieved on the Pacific Coast. Mrs Cornelius had a real show business talent which she owed chiefly to her exuberant vitality. She herself would always admit she had no outstanding gifts. Because I was more comfortable there (having made few public appearances in the State) most of the bookings I organised were in California. We became innocent again; Wandervögel, moving from town to town. This had definite advantages for our theatrical troupe. If you remain only briefly in a place and then swiftly travel on, your ability is rarely questioned while your novelty frequently passes for talent. Most of our audiences were grateful for any entertainment and we were able to satisfy them reasonably well. We toured regularly from the vicinity of Crescent City on the Oregon border all the way down to the San Diego region. We were tempted to cross into Mexico, but thought it unwise, given the problems we were likely to encounter with immigration. We were rarely the only feature on the bill. Sometimes, to fill in for a late or missing act. I even resumed my old role, lecturing to miners on the wonders of the future, or talking to fishermen about the perils of foreign Communism. We also performed our little musical play. It was of my own concoction. Wearing Don Cossack uniform and brandishing Georgian pistols, I played a Russian prince in love with Mrs Cornelius’s Bolshevik commissar. She elects, at the end, to go with me into exile. I called it White Knight and Red Queen. I was ra
ther flattered when this proved to be our most popular act. frequently drawing more applause than cinema films shown before and after the performance. We had become Limeys in Limelight and Mrs Cornelius had chosen the stage name of Charlene Chaplin. I was most frequently billed as Barry More. Most employers believed such names attracted custom. Privately I felt this deceptive association with the famous was likely to confuse and annoy audiences led to believe their film favourites were taking the plank stage of a tent theatre in Redondo Beach.

  I became adept at securing cheap lodgings and bargaining with the proprietors of carnivals, opera houses (saloons before prohibition) and ramshackle movie theatres. Our van proved a sound investment. It often served as shelter. The gypsy life was not unhealthy and indeed we all benefited. Though frequently tired and short of money we were rarely downhearted. A good climate makes an enormous difference to one’s spirits. Sunshine is an antidote to almost any ills. English people appreciate it almost as much as Russians. The other two girls were Mabel Church and Ethel Embsay. They were usually known as Gloria de Courcey and Constance Buckingham-Fairbank. Both were plain, cheerful creatures whose popularity had much to do with a fairly indiscriminate dispensation of off-stage favours. We acquired a drunken juggler-cum-comedian called Harold Hope: he drew more applause for his lack of dexterity than for any intrinsic skill with the Indian Clubs. For a while we also had a young black-face minstrel, Will Olsen. He left us outside Monterey after attempting to force himself on Mrs Cornelius. Next we employed Chief Buffalo Nose, a fire-eater from Brooklyn. His tribe was closer to the Plattfussindianern (as the joke went in Germany during the 30s) than it was to the Schwarzefussindianem. He rarely needed artificial help in lighting his breath. What always astonished me was how he kept his stomach from igniting.

  These were idyllic days. I had women almost always to hand, friendship and common sense from Mrs Cornelius, little thought for the future and less for the past. The small California towns were generally welcoming. They also possessed an innocence missed by modern Americans. Here were settlements unsullied by coloured invaders; unthreatened by godless ideologies. The soda fountain, the drugstore and the barbershop were the local meeting-places and the saloon, when it existed, was as sombre and peaceful, as respectable, as any church. I have seen the Disneyland brochures. But you cannot create Main Street as a nostalgic sideshow in a fun fair run by Mormons dressed as cartoon mice. Devo tornare indietro?

  America forfeited Main Street when she turned her back on Europe, leaving us to struggle alone against Carthage. She looked inward at the moment her power and idealism reached zenith. If she had looked outward, she would still have everything she yearns for now. I was there. America was euphorically taking the path to self-defeat. She suffered the perpetual delusion of the rich: that their wealth is the reward for some inherent moral superiority. I, who shared the benefits of California’s irresponsible youth, saw no better than did they the end to the privileged golden years, the gaiety and extravagance. But my time as an actor was not wasted. I learned much about ordinary people living on slender means, experiencing the daily realities of a world many Europeans still insist is wholly glamorous, naive or spoiled. My disappointment with America was to come later when I realised she refused her proper role of leader merely because she would rather be liked than respected. In the twenties she still had self-respect. That was why you could safely walk down Main Street, smelling sodas, malts, coffee and syrup in towns where only a generation or two earlier men had killed for a nugget of gold, a parcel of dirt.

  We travelled in the footsteps of Lola Montez, who had danced her way through the lumber camps and tent towns seventy years before. From the wooden metropolises of Lost Hill to the new, brick-built dignity of Calaveras County, through the great deserts and redwood forests, over mountain ranges and between steep hills, from gold to silver to oil, we sang our songs and declaimed our lines. In cities whose boardwalks protected our feet from mud we could turn a corner and find a full-sized oil well erected in the middle of the street. The great Mother Lode, which had brought San Francisco one of her richest and wildest periods, was played out, yet the hills remained full of prospectors. We drove through the shimmering passes of the High Sierras and the vast San Joaquin Valley when the plum blossom was at its fullest, through fields of cotton, across irrigated plains with lines of eucalyptus as far as the eye could see. We rested and breathed the almost narcotic scent of orange groves, plucked fresh peaches from the tree, feasted on trout caught from cool rivers. We performed in barns, tents and the public rooms of dilapidated hotels. We travelled as far as Flagstaff, Arizona, and one night made camp close to the rim of the Grand Canyon. That primeval vastness can only be experienced, never conveyed by word or picture. We drove our old ambulance through the Painted Desert. In Monument Valley the Indians’ eyes stared upon the death of all dreams. Navajo children had the trancelike expressions I already knew from Galata and, before that, the steppe-shtetls of Ukraine. They had been born into a century which had no place for them. Their rituals and traditions had lost function and reason. Now, through no fault of their own, these Indians could never be anything but outcasts. They were parasites in their own land, like the conquered Armenians, the Palestinian Jews and Russian kulaks. They had become Musselmanisch, as they said in Buchenwald. They had, in essence, ceased to live, these exemplary citizens of Carthage.

  Occasionally our tours would take us to larger cities, or at least their suburbs. It was in Auburn, a peaceful Northern Californian town, where the telegraph poles were still taller than most buildings, that I saw Brodmann again. I was crossing from a café called Rattlesnake Dick’s to the local post office. The only moving traffic on the wide steep street was a horse-buggy and two or three bicycles. The afternoon was sleepy and sunny. Auburn seemed to be enjoying a siesta. I had in my hand a note to Esmé and a postcard to Kolya. As usual I was begging for news, praying that soon one of my letters must reach them, wherever they were. I refused to consider the possibility they had been kidnapped back to Russia. Brodmann was standing on the wooden balcony of the old Freeman Hotel, at the very top of the hill. I could make out his figure clearly. Before disappearing back into the darkness of his room he waved once. I was fairly sure the gesture was simply a mocking one, but he might have been signalling to someone. I became very wary after that and insisted on leaving Auburn, to Mrs Cornelius’s annoyance since we had originally planned to spend the night there. For the next week I had difficulty playing my parts but saw no point in alarming anyone else with my knowledge. I still had no clear notion of Brodmann’s intentions. I was glad, however, when we began to move back towards the South.

  We played fairs and carnivals, wooden booths and magnificent theatres usually built for populations which had failed to materialise and which were slowly falling into decay. We played seaside resorts on piers and boardwalks, local fairs, fruit and flower festivals. We had become gypsies and were content enough, even if we sometimes dreamed of the moment when Florence Ziegfeld or Cecil B. DeMille would see us and put us under contract. We knew in our hearts it would never happen. The nearest we came at that time to someone of means taking us up was in San Luis Obispo when we heard one of William Randolph Hearst’s lieutenants was in the audience. Apparently he had been told by his boss to find some local entertainment for a party at Hearst’s ranch in the hills above the little town. I gathered we were unsuitable. No contract was offered.

  In November 1923, at Huntington Beach, we were doing our Russian playlet, a couple of sketches and a song medley, filling a bill with two ‘movie-dramas’ and four other acts at Maddison’s, a little beachfront vaudeville theatre on the fringes of the ‘entertainment strip’. Like several ocean-front villages in Southern California. Huntington Beach had become part resort, with the usual small hotels, fairgrounds, boardwalk sideshows, and part oil town. Very noticeable amongst the mixture of family groups, inebriated oil-riggers, bored-looking old people and other seaside regulars, an expensively-dressed but untidy man sat in
the front row, transfixed by Mrs Cornelius. I admit I felt some jealousy. Ethel guessed he was a theatrical agent when he sat through both that day’s performances but when he appeared backstage with a bunch of flowers I found vulgar in both colour and size, I remembered him. He, however, did not know me, perhaps because of my makeup. I was able to block his way before he got into our dressing-room. He was apologetic, even humble. His huge greying bulk (he was not yet forty) trembled in its loose suit as he blubbered how he would dearly love to make the acquaintance of Mrs Cornelius and express his sincere admiration for her acting. I had met him in Atlanta, at the Klankrest party. John ‘Mucker’ Hever, the oil engineer, sweating a little in the heat, somewhat fatter than before, would probably not have recalled me in any event. His eyes were full of Mrs Cornelius. His mouth was full of her. He was completely smitten. I did my best to get rid of him as quickly as I could. The last thing I wanted was for my alias and whereabouts to be passed on to the Klan. I was equally frightened that the Klan’s enemies might find me. Furthermore I did not think he was an appropriate suitor for Mrs Cornelius. I took his bouquet and his card and sent him away. I gave the flowers to Mrs Cornelius, but I kept the card. I told her I had no idea who they were from. Next day, however, he was back again, with roses and gardenias, more demands for an introduction. To my dismay I had to cope with him each evening for an entire week. At least I protected Mrs Cornelius from him. I was relieved when we were on the road again, moving down the coast to San Diego. The huge white-topped breakers of the Pacific, the palms and the yellow beaches soon took my mind off ‘Mucker’, his ludicrous passion and my dismay at encountering this unexpected reviver of my previous persona.