The Laughter of Carthage: Pyat Quartet

by Michael Moorcock

  On April 1st 1921 the city had begun to turn green and luminous. There were early blossoms appearing like blemishes upon the perfectly manicured body of the Luxembourg Gardens and citizens emerging from their winter cocoons walked with a livelier step. Pretty girls put on spring paint and glanced at my handsome car as I drove past but I barely noticed them. I was immersed in my anxieties. I had decided at last, as letters began to arrive from creditors and I was regularly abused by people on the street outside our deserted offices, that I could wait no longer. Either Brodmann and his Chekists would sense I was unprotected and strike, or the French Fraud Police would arrest me. Matters were worsening daily. There was no doubt I was to be sacrificed by de Grion and his high society friends so they could claim to have been duped by a foreign adventurer. Some of the newspaper stories in the conservative press undoubtedly had their source in de Grion. Kolya and I, together with most ordinary shareholders, were the only real dupes, but there was no way to prove it. Everything was on de Grion’s side: more than he knew, in my case. I read the reports: it was suggested I was a Bolshevik agent fraudulently gathering gold for Moscow, that I represented German Zionist interests, that I was a wanted criminal in Italy and Turkey. I knew enough about such campaigns to predict the outcome of this one. I was a perfect scapegoat, as Kolya had told me. I must forget any hope of continuing my fight in France. It would only mean imprisonment. I would go abroad and there clear my name. With my French passport I would have no great trouble getting to England, but I was still too close to the source of danger. Kolya, as always, gave me the best advice. I would spend some time in America, meet Esmé and Kolya there, then enter Britain later, when the publicity was forgotten.

  As I drove home that afternoon I made up my mind to tell Esmé my intention of taking the ship from Cherbourg to New York. Kolya would keep her safe until she followed me. I had no choice. In America I would swiftly redeem my name. By the time she arrived I would be well on the way to re-establishing myself. The naïveté and optimism of Americans now looked attractive. Obviously they had money for new ideas. They had not yet realised how successful the War had been for them. They were now, for the first time in their history, a major international creditor, still with no notion of their enormous power in a world where almost every other nation faced bankruptcy. Once in the United States, my earlier press cuttings would prove my credibility. These were the interviews which chiefly mentioned my earlier successes in Kiev and Constantinople.

  I arrived at the house to find it completely empty of people. A week before, the servants had left but now Esmé, too, was gone. Since the foundering of the company she had been frequently absent. She had been forced to find a social routine to relieve herself of boredom in my absence, now she used it to help her forget the terror of renewed poverty. I promised myself to make it up to her before I left. We should have a marvellous few days until I boarded the Mauretania, the liner I had chosen for my voyage. No longer the greatest ship afloat, she was rarely fully booked, but everyone said she had a pre-war elegance lacking in Cunard’s recent vessels with their emphasis on contemporary decor and pastel colours. At my desk, I wrote a letter to Mrs Cornelius. My last, describing my successes, had not been answered. Now I must tell her of my change of fortune. I would not be visiting England for some time. I had a visa permitting me six months in America and might even renew it if necessary. I would first stay in New York, then travel to Washington. There I intended to contact government officials and show them my patents. I wished her luck with her stage career. I suggested she might find the film medium suitable to her talents. I asked to be remembered to Major Nye.

  Esmé was still not home by eight. I left her a note and went to see Kolya. He insisted on visiting the nightclub in the Rue Boissy d’Anglais and eating ‘hot dogs’ - ‘So you know what kind of food they serve in America and will not appear unsophisticated on arrival!’ He seemed in high spirits but was, I am sure, merely presenting a good front, to cheer me up. Leaving him was, in a different way, as painful as leaving Esmé. He said he would probably follow in a couple of months, as soon as the scandal died. For all he knew he would bring Esmé to me himself. I had only this hope. I was in danger of falling back ‘within the nightmare’, scarcely able to think clearly around emotional matters. I had no wish to leave my two dearest friends or to desert Europe. The United States seemed so far away. It might have lain beyond the edge of the world. But that was also its attraction.

  At our little table under an archway smeared with bright yellow and crimson grotesques, Kolya and I watched a negro dance band play for ballet girls twisting themselves in parodies of classical movements. My friend had more information for me. ‘Stay at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Everyone insists it’s magnificent. It’s so modern an underground railway leads directly into the basements, just for the convenience of guests. I’ve made reservations for you through Cook’s. Your passport describes you as an engineer, so you’ll have no difficulty. Engineers are national heroes in America. Next time you come to Paris, you’ll be aboard your own air liner. Never fear, Dimka, you’ll prove the lie to the press!’

  We drank to my success, but I remained fearful. In Russia I had been swept along by profound historical forces, but in France mere financial trickery had dictated my fate. (Yet the Shadow World of Carthage, the Fifth Dimension, exists on the fringes of our own, preparing to engulf us, and its modern weapon is money, the stock exchange. It lies in the East yet at the same time is everywhere, for it intersects our own dimensions on levels conventional science cannot as yet define.) That night, too, Kolya and I made our private farewells. Having given up the little place at Neuilly, we took a hotel room in Rue Bonaparte. It was a sweet goodbye and we both wept. We were fated to be together, just as Esmé and I were fated. His delicate features in the light from the street was the moon haunted, tragic face of a nineteenth-century pierrot. We were to meet again, of course, before I left for Cherbourg, but this was the true time of our parting.

  I arrived home to find Esmé still dressed. Her hair was dishevelled. In her white and silver evening gown she resembled a frantic Christmas fairy fluttering about the empty rooms. She was drunk. She had returned, she said, to find me gone. Believing herself deserted she had taken a taxi to search the streets. I showed her my unopened note where I had left it for her. She looked wildly at it, shaking her head dumbly. For a moment her eyes had the flat glow of a puppet’s, without expression or consciousness, then she lowered her lids while at the same time shrinking into a chair, as if her entire body folded in on itself; as if her mind were being sucked into some unfathomable secret place. I became alarmed that I had caused this condition. When I tried to rouse her she shivered, looking up at me only once with an expression of terrified anticipation. I stepped back from her. ‘What’s happened?’

  She could not move. Her lips closed, then remained partly open. Eventually I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom where I undressed her. She lay with the sheets to her chin, her eyes following me as I moved, preparing for bed. She made no response to my questions. I decided I was worrying too much. Drink and the late hour were responsible for her behaviour. I went to sleep, determined to tell her my plans in the morning.

  At breakfast she was herself again, unusually bright, happy as a canary. She had arranged to lunch with her friend Agnes in the Champs Elysées. I did not know Agnes. Would she object if I accompanied her? But Agnes had a secret to discuss and a man would not be welcome, ‘I, too, have an important secret, Esmé. Something I wanted to say last night.’

  Esmé cocked her head to one side, her blue eyes unblinking, a piece of toast halfway to her mouth. ‘Are you buying a new car? Is the airship out of trouble?’ Careless and light-minded, she had become a true Parisienne, taking nothing seriously save the exact effect on her looks of the latest mascara. While not begrudging her this happiness, I was a little irritated. Yet I could not sustain anger. I laughed. ‘The news is bad, darling. Our Company is worse than dead. The vultures close in and
I’m the only meat left for them. Everyone else has run away.’ Her giggle was unexpected, like the trilling of a blackbird at a funeral. ‘They can’t harm you, Maxim. You’re invulnerable. You’ll come up with a plan.’ I had hoped for sympathy or at least concern and was disturbed rather than encouraged by this statement of confidence. ‘It’s a desperate plan, however,’ I said. ‘You must listen to me, Esmé.’

  She was on her feet. I think she wished to avoid the truth, escape the disturbing facts. That was why she had behaved so strangely last night. She moved rapidly, nervously, still a dressed-up little girl, towards the door. ‘Then we must talk, of course, Maxim. I’ll be home by this afternoon. Let’s have tea somewhere at four. Shall I meet you here?’

  ‘I want to talk now.’

  ‘At four.’ She turned back, ran forward, put her arms round my neck, kissed me on the nose and smiled. ‘If it’s bad news, four o’clock’s the ideal time to hear it. If it’s good, we can celebrate tonight.’

  I looked at the pile of letters I myself was too fearful to open. All were connected to the Company’s failure. I would never open them. I returned to bed, staying there until lunch time while I tried to review my situation. I was furiously incredulous that I was destitute. I lay in my huge, clean bed, looking up at the ornate ceiling while sunlight brought Parisian spring into the beautiful room. Yet my only asset, save for my Odessa luck pieces, was the Hotchkiss, which would have to be sold and the profit handed to Kolya for Esmé. Letting Esmé have her own money would be foolish. She had become habitually extravagant. She could spend anything I gave her in a day. The house would only be ours for another month and most of the furniture was gone. There was very little left to arrange. I could rely on Kolya to take care of anything else. My only fear was that my news would bring Esmé too heavily down to earth. I was afraid she would fall back into her delirium; I should not be able to leave her if she suffered another. I tried, with this in mind, rehearsing the exact tone of my revelations. But half my brain would not respond to the other. I hate to admit the truth: I was to be torn away from the girl I regarded as my own flesh. Yet I at least had become used to disappointment, disillusion, betrayal. She had known only sunshine and ease since she had met me. How much worse it might be for her, with no automatic means of anaesthetising herself.

  I ate a sandwich and drank a glass of beer in the brasserie round the corner from the house, walking down St-Michel to the Seine. It was damp spring weather with a slight mist in the air and on the water. The quayside bookstalls were mostly closed up, but a few patient old men like unkempt dogs sat guarding their wares. Traffic clogging the bridge was so still, so muted, I imagined time had frozen and myself the only unaffected individual in the entire city. Sounds became increasingly muffled and faint. The people I passed took on an unreal appearance, like projections in a cinema film, though the colours were brilliant. I crossed over the bridge to Notre Dame where I stood looking up at the cathedral’s massive doors. They represented a barricade against the corruption of the world outside. In all her sensual beauty, Paris surrounded me; her trees, just budding, were isolated one from the other. She was the least compassionate of cities, the most self-involved. She rewarded success grudgingly while quickly punishing failure. In her present haughtiness it was impossible to imagine how she had been during the Revolution or the Siege, with the mob in her streets, screaming and destroying. I could understand, I thought, how she had come to be attacked by her own inhabitants; by pétroleuses with crazed, wounded eyes, trying to burn her into recognition of her own mortality. They had failed, if indeed that had ever been their ambition. She remained impassive. Poverty and distress merely disgusted her. Noise offended her. She turned away from it.

  By the time I walked back it had begun to rain. Beside the little round church of St Julien Pauvre, I heard the almost mechanical click of water on her laurels, smelling the dampness of her graveyard as a curtain of drizzle moved slowly across to me. I kept to backstreets and doorways. I could not afford to be found either by Brodmann or Tsipliakov. But Paris knew I was there: she intended to purge me as if I were an alien microbe. I longed for the warm chaos of Rome, even the filth and clamouring greed of Constantinople. I could not begin to imagine New York. In other cities, in their marble and granite towers, the world’s Mapmakers were still at work. The arms dealers and the grain merchants tested the pulse of a desperate planet. Greeks were betrayed to Turks; Russians to Poles; Ukrainians to Russians and Italians to ‘Jugo-Slavs’. Ideas of virtue and probity were subtly discredited. Jazz music drowned all protest. Would America, providing so much of this distraction, be even worse than here? I countered my fear. There were Russian colonies in Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Argentina. If the United States failed me I could go South. From there it would be easy to find my way back to Europe. With this consolation I turned into the little cinema at L’Odeon and watched part of Birth of a Nation again, emerging into sunshine, my optimism restored.

  I arrived back at the house by four, but Esmé did not return until six, full of pretty apologies, cursing buses and taxis and the traffic on the South Bank, kissing me all over my face, telling me about the present she had bought me. She had left it on the tram. She would get me another on Monday. It was too late to have tea, but since she seemed in such fundamentally good spirits I decided to speak.

  ‘Esmé, I have decided to leave France.’

  ‘What?’ She looked up from where she had been sorting through her purse. ‘For Rome?’

  ‘They’ll put me in prison if I don’t get as far away as possible. So I’m going to America.’

  She was half smiling. She thought I joked. ‘But I want to go to America with you.’

  ‘You’ll join me there, as soon as Kolya has a passport for you. There’s a delay, because you have no proper documents. There are so many émigrés in your situation everything takes longer. It will only be a question of weeks at most. Then we’ll be together again.’

  ‘Where shall I live?’ She looked up frowning, putting the purse to one side. ‘The rent here is only good for another month.’

  ‘Kolya has offered you a room in their Paris apartment. He and Anäis are not there half the time so you’d have the place to yourself a good deal. And servants. Everything you want. Possibly Kolya and Anäis will be able to bring you to New York. They intend to go soon.’

  She had grown pale and was biting her lower lip. Her eyes cast about as if she had lost something.

  ‘You mustn’t be afraid.’ I was gently reassuring. ‘You’ll soon be meeting Douglas Fairbanks.’

  She smiled. ‘Maxim, do you love me?’

  ‘With all my heart.’ The question somehow disturbed me. ‘You are my wife, my sister. My daughter. My rose.’ I moved towards her.

  ‘Why do you love me?’

  ‘When I first saw you I felt something. An echo of recognition. I had always sought for you. I found you again. I’ve told you this before.’

  ‘I love you too, Maxim.’ She still seemed distracted. Perhaps she was resisting the meaning of my news.

  ‘I’ll stay, my darling, if you need me.’

  She was brave, my little girl. ‘No. That would be wrong. I want you to go. I’ll join you soon. You must fulfil your destiny. It lies in America now.’

  ‘You’re behaving splendidly.’ I had expected tears.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ she said flatly.

  I reached out and touched my fingers to her lips. She kissed them, glancing up at me with a strange, almost tragic, expression. Then she gasped and dropped her head. I held her shoulder. ‘You won’t notice I’m gone. You’ll know I’m with you in spirit the whole time. I love you, Esmé.’

  ‘I always feel you’re with me.’ Her voice was small, sounding oddly ashamed. Her response was mystifying and yet touching. ‘You must try not to miss me,’ I said.