The Poles called the Tsarist Empire ‘Byzantium’ and use the same word today for the Soviet Union. The Polish talent for piety is almost as great as their talent for laziness. I did not become an émigré merely to own a little house in Putney and work for a record company. They are not martyrs. They are self-pitying petit bourgeoisie. They would complain under any regime. I wish people would stop introducing them to me. It is the same with the Czechs. We have nothing in common beside basic Slavonic. During the War it was all Poles. Now it is all Czechs. Mrs Cornelius told the neighbours how great I had been and how I had suffered. But I did not want their pity. I gambled, I said to her, and I lost.
I go up to the canal near Harrow Road. It is so bleak there. Everything is rotting. Everything is grey. There is slime on the water. The tow-path is littered with filth. I look at the backs of derelict buildings where unhealthy children smash the remaining windows and piss on floorboards which are beds for tramps. They spray the bricks with their excrement and illiterate slogans. This is Sunday afternoon and this is my exercise! My day off, my stroll, my relaxation! I have seen the wonders of Constantinople, the glories of Rome, the masculine grandeur of Berlin before they bombed it, the elegance of Paris, the brutal magnificence of New York, the dreaming luxury of Los Angeles. I have worn silk from top to bottom. I have satisfied my lust with women of outstanding beauty and breeding. I have experienced at first hand all the world’s noblest engineering miracles: the great liners, the skyscrapers, the planes and the airships. I have known the exhilaration of rapid, luxurious travel. But now I totter along a disgusting tow-path, staring at flotsam and smeared walls, terrified in my frailty for my worthless old life, praying I do not slip on a dog turd or attract the ruthless curiosity of some prepubescent footpad. Their noises echo over the water; the mysterious croaks and grunts of primitive amphibians heralding a return to bloody ignorance and unsentient savagery.
I have been here nearly half my life! Since 1940, in one part of London. Dopoledne . . . The first half was spent exploring and instructing the entire civilised world. Major Sinclair, the great American aviator and my mentor, warned me I was not doing the fashionable things. He too was ruined for his unpopular views. His friend Lindbergh was another great man brought low by petty, vicious enemies. Lindbergh once told me his closest-kept secret. He had never meant to fly to England at all. He had originally set out for Bolivia, but his instruments had deceived him. We had much in common, Lindbergh and myself. He knew why the Jews destroyed the Hindenburg.
Under the arches of the motorway (with which ‘planners’ bisected Notting Dale and Ladbroke Grove without a thought for those who have to live below) gypsies build shacks of old doors and corrugated iron, parking battered caravans amongst heaps of rubble and scrap. Their thin dogs run everywhere; their children are dirty and neglected. The wonderful modern road speeds traffic to and from the West, from Bristol and Bath and Oxford where people live in eighteenth-century elegance. It is a white, efficient road and has done much, they say, to remove traffic from residential streets. But to build it they had to knock our houses down. Unstable, featureless towers were erected in their place. On both sides of Ladbroke Grove, in the shadows of the Westway. stagger alcoholics of both sexes, young and old, begging for coins to buy methylated spirits, swearing at you if you dare to refuse. Or at night lounging boys accost you, their black faces snarling threats. From within the concrete caves butane gas sputters, just as the naphtha flared above the market-stalls in winter in old Kiev. They built a great white road to the West and thus created a warren for thieves and skinheads who cling to the surface of civilisation like detritus around a boat. Yet without civilisation they could not survive.
I do not say Portobello Road and Notting Dale were perfect. Taxi-drivers refused to take you to Golborne Road at night. We were famous for our prostitutes and half the population was on the borderline of crime. Policemen went in threes through our alleys. But the social workers and politicians told us this would be changed. The road, they said, would abolish injustice and squalor. The filthy lorries would go. There would be paradise in the city. And what do we have?
Rock and roll bands give free concerts in the motorway bays and exhort their audience to Revolution and the smoking of hashish. Whores give their customers a cheap time against the pillars and negro homosexuals squabble and shriek while the traffic moans above their heads, taking the Lords and Ladies to Bath and Oxford and Heathrow. Those planners dreamed of Utopia but denied all reality. Then Utopia was no longer financially possible. Perhaps it never had been. Nonetheless, they continued to build as if nothing had changed. They built their wonderful road, much as the natives of New Guinea build bamboo aeroplanes to coax back the marvellous cargoes which came from the sky during World War II.
They told us they would plant flower-gardens in the mud they had created. It is bezhlavy. They said they would build theatres and shops and provide social services under the Westway: but they have even failed to deal with the gypsies who fight and drink beneath the arches from Shepherds Bush to Little Venice; murdering one another, beating their wives and children, refusing either education or work, while youth gangs menace old-age pensioners and wheezing mental-deficients display their diseased genitalia to little boys. And they had the temerity to laugh at me for my dreams! Is their Utopia any worse than mine? And where is the prosperity we were to see? The traders come from their suburbs to the Portobello Road on Fridays and Saturdays, wearing their bohemian finery, selling their high-priced junk. They make a tourist attraction of a slum. And they turn the tourist attraction even more into a slum when they leave. I see the bewildered Americans on a Thursday, wandering up and down the dirty streets looking for the glamour which, like a travelling fair, is only there at certain times, disguising the permanence of poverty and ignorance. Where are the Beatles and the bobbies on bicycles, two by two? Where are the great walls of Windsor and the bells of Old St Paul’s? They have no wish for anything but the romance. On a Thursday, we are not capable of providing it.
Does any of that tourist money stay here? No. It is taken back to Surbiton and Twickenham and Purley; and at night the muggers and the alcoholics re-emerge as if nothing has occurred to interrupt their routines. The tourists return to Brown’s and White’s and the Inn On The Park. Up the West End, that’s the best end. . . Disneyworld last year, Englandworld this. Each country a different theme-park, existing in isolation, cosmetically perfect. And the Westway carries the buses and the sports cars and the trucks over the grime, the unromantic desperate poverty, and nobody need ever know in what human degradation its great pillars are sunk. But it made a profit for Mr Marples and Mr Ridgeway; it made a profit for the speculators of the swinging sixties, the Feinsteins and the Goldblatts and the Greenburgs.
Mrs Cornelius hated the Westway. She said it destroyed the character of the neighbourhood. It attracted outsiders, too, who had no business coming. ‘This woz orlways a friendly district. Everyone knew everyone else. Now ‘arf ther people in ther noo flats ‘re from Tower ‘Amlets an’ Spitalfields. No bleedin’ wonder there’s more crime abart. They know their mums carn’t spot ‘em.’ She firmly believed most thieves were young and did not properly understand the rules: you did not steal from your own. The old family gangs of Notting Dale used to fight amongst themselves. If you were not associated with the gangs you were left alone. The break-up of the family has had consequences even the Church could not anticipate. But we are watching civilisation itself collapse, after all, throughout the Christian world. The Hun swarms again over our ruins and hucksters unpack their stalls in our holy places; travelling players perform lewd charades in our churches while the patrician hides in his villa outside the city, afraid to raise his voice against the very people who bought his birthright. So History repeats and Christ looks down on us and weeps. I thought to save the world from meanness and cruelty; instead I have survived to witness its degeneration. I might even live to see its final destruction.
I did my best. Mrs Corneli
us alone appreciated the appalling irony of my life. I was a genius, but I lacked an appreciation of Evil. My Baroness called me ‘charmingly amoral’. By this I think she meant the same thing.
* * * *
THREE
WE ARE THE shifting pastures on which the microbes graze, our dead skin is their sustenance and we are their universe. Perhaps we move in orbits as predictable to them as planets and that is why mosquitoes always know where to find us. It might only be delusion which makes us believe we travel at random or according to individual volition. Russian soil was to know my feet sooner than I might ever have guessed when I left Odessa. It was probably pre-ordained. I impressed the captain with a suggestion of business in Batoum important to the Government forces, so he willingly gave me leave to spend time ashore. The Baroness, too, would be allowed to go, though he made it clear he would not be responsible for any passengers who failed to board by the time the ship sailed again. ‘We remain under orders to take off as many refugees as we can reasonably accommodate, Mr Pyatnitski. However, we are not a civilian vessel and there’s some urgency about our commission, as I’m sure you understand.’
I gave him my word I would be on deck when the Rio Cruz cast off from Batoum. ‘I hope to contact certain anti-Bolshevik elements while ashore,’ I said. He said my reasons were my own affair. I immediately sought out Leda Nicolayevna who of course was delighted with my news and already planned to leave Kitty and the nanyana on board. Her excuse was that she planned to shop for a day or two. She thought we should stay just one night and return to the ship. If the Rio Cruz was still not ready to sail, we could then spend another night in Batoum, and so on. ‘But how shall we find a hotel?’
‘I will solve the problem easily,’ I told her. ‘I have lived by my wits all my life. I am extremely resourceful.’
Her love-making that afternoon was if anything more joyously zestful than ever and eagerly I began to look forward to our ‘shore-leave’ as she called it.
By breakfast-time next morning the air was much warmer but it had begun to rain with steady persistence. At the table. Captain Monier-Williams announced we should be docking in Batoum within two hours. ‘It will be a relief to put in to a port where some sort of order survives.’ This was his third visit in two months. The British had administered both town and harbour for almost a year. ‘Though God knows what it’s like now. The last time I spoke to Drake, the Captain of the Port, he was at his wit’s end. Huge numbers flooding in from all over Russia.’
‘The British should be flattered,’ I said. ‘It means they’re trusted.’
‘If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Pyatnitski, it’s a terrible burden. What happens when we leave?’
‘They’ll pack up and move across the border into Turkey.’ Jack Bragg cheerfully attempted to save my feelings. ‘They can’t be worse off.’ Anatolia was only ten miles from Batoum. ‘Perhaps we should go the whole hog and declare the place a British Protectorate?’
‘I’m not sure the Russian Army would be pleased to hear that.’ Captain Monier-Williams offered me a dry little smile. ‘Anyway, at least here we’ll get a fairly clear idea of what our job’s supposed to be. Anyone wishing to go ashore had better get a chit from Mr Larkin.’ The Second Officer was acting as purser and as liaison between the Russian passengers and the British crew. Mrs Cornelius was not yet up and I was grateful. I would have been embarrassed had she been there before I was able to tell her my plans. ‘I’ll warn you,’ the captain went on, ‘that Bolshevik agents are everywhere in town. A fair bit of sabotage and general mayhem, I gather. So be careful who you talk to.’ This was addressed to us all. ‘And we’ll be checking papers and possessions pretty carefully when you come back. We don’t want any bombs slipped into your suitcases.’ He spoke sardonically, but it was evident his attitude towards his job was unchanged. He was as impatient as anyone to reach Constantinople.
As I rose to leave, the seedy Hernikof sidled up to the captain. He was dressed in dreadful tweed and smoking a German cigar. His unsteady eyes and weak mouth seemed to race through a dozen different configurations as if he sought the combination most agreeable to our commander. ‘Sir,’ he said thickly, in English, ‘I would be grateful for a word.’
Monier-Williams, I am sure, liked him no better than I, but he was polite and patient with the Jew, as he was with all of us. Hernikof spoke softly and I could not understand him. I was anxious to withdraw, so made an excuse and went out on deck to join my Baroness forward. She was standing by the rail under her wide umbrella, dressed in dark blue. Kitty was playing nearby with two little wooden dolls, under the shelter of the bridge, while Marusya Veranovna sat stolidly beside her, at attention on a folding stool, eyeing the dolls as if they might be rabid. I lifted my hat to them both as the Baroness turned, smiling at me. We exchanged our usual fairly formal greeting, then I said quietly: ‘In two hours we’ll reach Batoum. But you must see Mr Larkin and obtain a pass. It will look best, I think, if we go separately.’
‘Of course.’ She had on new perfume. There were roses in it and it seemed to promise summer. For a few moments, while she went over to tell her servant that she would be gone for a while, I was reminded of my childhood, of the scent of lilac in Kiev at springtime, of cornfields and poppies and picking long-stemmed wild-flowers in the gorges with Esmé. I would have given anything to have returned for a little while to that relaxed state of innocence which had been completely destroyed in less than an hour, when I found Esmé in the anarchist’s camp and she was laughing about what had become of her. She had been raped so many times, she said, she had callouses on her cunt. It would never again be possible to be sweetly, ordinarily, carelessly in love. I longed for that foolish happiness. I longed to re-experience it with my Leda, to believe our union unique, eternal. But it was impossible. With the exception of Mrs Cornelius, women were now a threat to my well-being. They betrayed one’s finer feelings. I trusted men no better; but one did not as a rule put one’s heart into the hands of a man. And children, as I was to learn again and again, can be the worst betrayers of all.
The Baroness returned in good spirits, with her pass. When I got to the saloon, however, I had to join a line of about ten people. I was immediately behind the odious Hernikof who turned and once again insisted on addressing me in tones of uncalled-for intimacy, lie would not be put off. He was telling me something about relatives he hoped to find in Batoum, the rumour that both Whites and Reds were ransoming Jews in order to finance their campaigns, that the Allies were discussing the idea of some Utopian Zionist State between Russia and Turkey to act as a kind of buffer against the Bolsheviks; so much nonsense I made myself deaf to it. Meanwhile Mr Larkin, long-faced and serious as always, with frowning concentration and glittering bald head, had seated himself at a little card table and busily checked papers or wrote short letters on sheets with the name of the ship stamped at the top. He spent far too long with Hernikof, but at last I received my own pass and he was quick enough, for of course he recognised me. A simple enough letter informing whomever it concerned that the undersigned. Maxim A. Pyatnitski, was travelling on His Majesty’s Merchant Ship Rio Cruz from Odessa to Constantinople and had been granted permission to stay ashore in Batoum until five hours before the ship was due to leave port. I had to sign at the foot of the page and take my ordinary identity papers with me. ‘The five hours bit is to be on the safe side,’ said Mr Larkin. ‘You shouldn’t have any trouble if you’re a little late.’
By the time I rejoined my Baroness, the coast was in sight, the rain had lifted and the horizon was beginning to brighten. ‘Won’t it be wonderful if there’s sunshine?’ She was animated. ‘They say it’s possible to have very warm days even at this time of year.’
I could not believe the British would abandon Batoum. ‘Maybe we should think of settling there,’ I said, phrasing as a joke my genuine distress at leaving Russian soil; distress which I knew she shared. She made a cheerful, fatalistic gesture. ‘Let’s enjoy the hours we have for what t
hey are, not for what they might be.’
I decided to break the news to Mrs Cornelius. She was dressing when I knocked on the cabin door. ‘Jes’ give us arf a mo’ ter get me knickers on.’ She was looking extremely well, with her face flushed and her eyes bright, and she had on an orange dress. I told her I was going ashore to see Batoum for a day or so, hoping to look up one or two old friends.
‘I’ll prob’bly bump inter yer, then.’ She grinned as she drew on her fox-fur wrap. ‘I waz thinkin’ o’ poppin’ over ther side fer a bit meself.’ She laughed at my expression. ‘Yer don’ mind, do yer?’
It had not occurred to me she would want to leave the ship. I could do nothing but nod, shrug, smile, pack a change of clothes into my small folding bag and agree that we should think of having dinner somewhere together in Batoum. She was the last person I wanted to know of my liaison with the Baroness. I left the bag on my bunk and returned to the forward deck.
The Laughter of Carthage: Pyat Quartet Page 55
