The Laughter of Carthage: Pyat Quartet

by Michael Moorcock

  These days I am made to live on scraps; their chips, their pieces of cold fish. The borscht comes in a bottle and is more than I can pay. It is kosher; there is no ham bone in it. The soup is in tins. Good food is no longer within my means. I have dined exquisitely off gold and drunk from crystal. Yet I secretly knew I would some day be here. There is thin carpet beneath my broken chair. I wear gloves on my hands, one to hold the paper, the other to grasp the pen. There is no one to listen, no one to read what I write. It is private. I trusted only Mrs Cornelius and she is dead. I have been made to pay too dearly for my dreams. Drunken black men come into my shop and spit on my jackets. When I complain they bring the Race Relations police. I am too old for arguments. I am without power. The British protect no one. It suits them to believe me a complaining old Jew. And I am the one who tried to warn them! It is like a terrible nightmare. I speak but I am not heard. I am not seen. It is an irony only a Russian truly appreciates. I was recognised before the War. By France, by Italy, Germany, America, Spain. But for that dreadful misunderstanding in Berlin, brought about by the jealousy and malice of small people, I should even now have my place in History.

  ‘It don’t do to think of the past,’ said the man in the Post Office the other day. Five years ago it cost a mere 3p to send a letter! It seems impossible. They meddled with our currency. At a stroke they robbed us of half its value. What is that but International Finance? And is not International Finance simply a euphemism for World Jewry? They say ‘the past is the past’ as if that somehow excuses everything. But the past might also be the present and the future. In the twenties we believed Time had substance and could be measured, analysed, manipulated like Space. We were more confident then. We spoke of Time ‘repeating’ and ‘feeding back on itself, of having ‘cycles’. We read John Donne’s Experiments With Time and went to see the plays of Sir Jack B. Presley. Time became a small, comfortable mystery for a while, an old friend. Not the grinning, bony horseman of the Middle Ages. Then came Nuclear Energy and the Expanding Universe. Time was reclaimed by Einstein’s gloomy moralists, his finger-wagging Jews. We fell again into the power of those pinched-lipped nomad shepherds.

  The Jew brings dark confusion to the city. Here he can divide and rule. But he does not understand what he conquers. His rules are at odds with our rules: nomads cannot conceive of individuals with many functions and forms. They think a man who is more than one man is somehow evil, that a God who is Three cannot be. They demand consistency of an environment which to survive must constantly change. Christ was the Prophet of the City. He preached optimism and practical control. In the cities He was heard and accepted. The city is History, for the city is Man: He has created His own environment and rules. He built Sumer. Sumer was only destroyed when it became impossible for her to live by that blind obedience which means survival in the desert and which is suicide in the city.

  I know these hippies. They go to the country to look for God as soon as it is Summer. But God is the City. The City is Time. The City is our true Salvation. We adapt it and are adapted by it. Science alone can help us return to God. I have lost the battle, but surely somewhere the War continues. The nomad cannot have won everything There shall be War in Heaven, as the great Henry Williams said. They must listen. The English are conservative and condescending. They acknowledge only those of their own blood. If they had listened to me they could have had the laser, the jet engine and nuclear reactors long before the Americans. Arrogant in the twenties, Lloyd George planned further Imperial expansion. He should have consolidated, held the line. Others would have come to help. They decided to proceed alone, as deluded as the very Turks they had defeated, and followed in their complacency the crumbling road of Abdul Hamit, last true Ottoman Sultan. Mrs Cornelius listened to me with real attention. She had vision. In 1920 I thought her a typical representative of a generation of keen-eyed British people. I was wrong. She represented the past. ‘Ther British are ther most open-minded people in ther world,’ she would say. ‘Look at orl ther fuckin’ foreigners we let in.’

  Time after time I tried to warn you. You were being destroyed from within. Even your scientific journals ignored me. The New Scientist is controlled by Communists. It has yet to print one of my letters. Party-line science is not true science; it is no better than magic; it is worse than alchemy. If the scientific ideal is perverted for political expediency you soon find yourself controlled by a Lysenko or Hoyle: dancing bears who will caper to any tune. They provide whatever their masters need. Mrs Cornelius was my comfort. Only she appreciated how profound my dedication was, but she feared neither for my sanity nor my soul. She knew the world’s praise would come, perhaps after we were both dead. All I wanted was knowledge. I stood the brunt of every insult, spiritual, moral, physical. I am a little steppe-rooted tree which bends in the wind and is never blown over. Put me in the Portobello Road, surround me with blacks and Asians, feed me Jewish Wimpys and Cornish Pasties, and still I survive. Some of the older people in Finch’s and The Princess Alexandra listen to me. I am too miserable to go to The Elgin now Mrs Cornelius is dead. Her friends understood suffering. They remembered the thirties and two Wars. But only the old Greek knows what 1453 really means. He sells fish and chips across the road from my shop. He stinks of grease and vinegar. His clothes are stained and his flesh splashed with patches of brown. They show him no more respect than they show me.

  When the last Emperor of Byzantium died on his own battlements, his sword in his hand, the Turk wore chain mail and gilded helmets. He bore the banners of Islam and he cried the name of Allah. He came with his scimitars and his slaves, his eunuchs and his seraglios, his mosques and his imams, and he established himself in Constantinople. But now the Turk disguises himself. He laughs at Buster Keaton in the National Film Theatre, he attends lectures at the London School of Economics, he drinks beer in pubs and sleeps with Surrey virgins. He becomes a stage-star or a dentist. He smiles agreeably and his voice is soft. Yet behind the facade it is always 1453. His ambitions have not changed in a thousand years. They are the same as when his Hun ancestors first rode towards the West, when Bayezid the Strangler led his troops upon Constantinople and was repulsed. His is the spawn of Attila and brother to Tamburlane. From Jews he learned how to bribe the corrupt, to buy the desperate, to assassinate the strong. Arabs believe themselves free of his Empire, yet continue unconsciously to do his work. The old Greek knows the Turk (‘he has a sword behind his back, a begging bowl stretching towards you’) but because he is a Greek does nothing about the problem. He only talks. He smiles and offers me his day’s leavings, his limp haddocks, his cooling scraps of cod. ‘You are a good Christian,’ I tell him. He and I both know kindness and meekness are self-destructive. But what is the alternative? It is the paradox we must all live with. It is the core of the Christian mystery.

  I have frequently been asked this question:

  For how many more millennia must we of the generous, gentle West suffer the avarice of the cunning East?

  The answer is simple. I wish I had known it in 1920 as the Rio Cruz steered into the Bosphorus. I reply now:

  Until a Christian Emperor takes mass in Hagia Sophia!

  With his Cross and his Sword of Light he will come out of the West to redeem us! He will trample the dark descendants of Carthage beneath the silver hoofs of a pure white horse! Carthage knows no ideal save conquest, no joy save cruelty, no comradeship save that of the sword. Hers are the children of Cain, infected by an ancient evil. They must perish. The Lamb must stand astride Constantinople, two feet in Europe, two in Asia!

  Fleeing to Australia is not the solution.

  The Hun is in Vienna; he is in Brussels and Paris; he is in Berne and Baden-Baden. He has reached the gates of Stockholm and Oslo! Did our Christian knights die in their thousands for nothing? Has nobody heard of the standard Communist strategy? When direct attack is blocked, infiltrate. Was Senator McCarthy crying in the wilderness?

  They say Adolf Hitler had a dark brain. If that is tr
ue then I too have a dark brain. I know the enemy and I am aware of his tactics. For this, they put me in the madhouse? Only last Sunday some English general wrote in the paper that he could not understand why so many Cossacks, Ukrainians and White Russians joined the German Army. I sent a letter. They enlisted to take vengeance on everyone who had betrayed them. Stalin was afraid of patriot and traitor alike. He killed all survivors. A Georgian, we used to say, is only a Turk who has put on a clean coat. My voice is weary from crying out warnings; my body is weak. I am lost in this wilderness of filth and decadence. I am attacked on all sides. I am slandered. Mother of God! What more must I give? Is there no one to whom I can pass my knowledge? Where are my sons and daughters? One child is all I want. Is it too much? The white light purifies my brain and mercury flows from my eyes. There are angels in the snow and their swords are silver. Little girls in cotton dresses run to me with scraps of paper and I cannot read them. They dazzle me. Carthage is on the horizon. Byzantium blazes like a mirror. It is to be the Final War. And the Knights of Christ are sleeping. Oh, how I envy those confident Jews!

  The fog was in my mouth.

  The fog was in my mouth. The ship crawled through noisy, invisible water. Every so often she would let out a mournful moan almost immediately muffled and distorted. I shivered in my coat, my hands tight upon my pistols. The deck made fussy little movements beneath my feet. I saw dark shadows come and go on the bridge, but nobody spoke. It seemed the foghorn was sometimes answered, but it could have been an echo. Philosophically I wondered if I might be about to make a symmetrical ending to my life and die on the same day I was born, before I ever caught sight of Constantinople. This amused me. I was fatigued, I suppose, from lust and over-use of cocaine, but I was suddenly certain that I had the symptoms of Hernikof s typhus. I felt tranquil, however, and reconciled. Again the horn, like the Last Trump, made the whole ship vibrate. I moistened my lips with a damp glove. The fog clung like the hands of the dead to our oak and brass. Failing to see anything of either shore, I decided to use more cocaine. I had great faith in the drug’s restorative powers and it would at least sustain me until I had a glimpse of Byzantium. I could not bear to miss what I had often been told was one of the world’s most wondrous sights. If I were to die, I promised myself, it would be looking upon Heaven. I went down the companionway to our deck, opened the door of the cabin, and found Mrs Cornelius unexpectedly awake. ‘Cor,’ she said, ‘wot a night, eh? Believe it or not, I fink I’ll ‘ave some brekker this morning.’ I was reassured by her cheerful normality. ‘Eaten yet, Ive?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  While she rose to wash and dress, I sat down weakly on her bunk. Keeping my back to her as had become our custom I was able to draw a little cocaine into my nostrils. Almost immediately I felt better. She was now wearing her green silk dress with a mink coat thrown over it. ‘Good enough,’ she said of herself.

  In the dining saloon she ordered a large breakfast. ‘Bloody fog,’ she said. ‘I was ‘opin’ fer a view. Never seen it from this side, really.’

  She noticed with dismay some stains on her frock. ‘Where’d they come from?’ She brushed. ‘We ‘ad a few larst night, didn’t we?’ As if expressing a sense of achievement she crossed her plump silken legs. The boy brought her bacon and eggs which looked revolting. All around us Russians were taking black bread, omelettes and tea. She smacked her lips and shook sugar onto her fried bread, her usual custom. ’Yer never know when yer gonna get yer next proper breakfast,’ she said. ‘It was six bloody years, larst time, fer me.’ She ate rapidly, ordering more bacon and eggs even before she had finished the first plate. ‘An’ yer better bring some toast an’ marmalade,’ she instructed the boy. My own stomach was too weak for this. I told her I needed some air. ‘I’ll see yer on deck,’ she promised.

  The fog was thinning, but it was not yet possible to see a shore. The wake of the ship became visible, however. I smoked a papyrussa and rested against the sterncastle rail. The Baroness found me as I began violently to cough. I did my best to stop, but merely shook and spluttered more. ‘You look ill, Simka. Could you have caught whatever it was poor Hernikof had?’

  This alarmed me so much that the coughing continued afresh. I could tell her nothing of my fears. It was in nobody’s interest to start a panic on board ship.

  ‘Have you and your wife found somewhere to stay in Constantinople?’ she asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘We must be sure not to lose touch.’

  I nodded in agreement. Another fit of coughing consumed me. The Baroness was distant and cool. Perhaps she deliberately prepared herself for separation. To me, however, she seemed offended. I frowned at her. I could not speak.

  She took my frown for a question and apologised. ‘I’m not myself today. The anxiety, I suppose. It will be the first time I have been to a country where Russian is not generally spoken.’

  My fears for myself were rather more immediate. I determined I would seek out a nurse or a doctor as soon as was discreetly possible.

  Jack Bragg strolled up. He pushed pale hair back from a pink face framed in navy blue. ‘Not much of a view, I’m afraid. Frequently you can see both banks by now. But the fog’s clearing nicely.’ Then half to himself, ‘With any luck the whole bloody place has been swallowed up.’ His brother had been a prisoner in Scutari during the War and he had no love for the Turks. ‘Where will you be staying. The Pera?’

  I said my wife had made the arrangements. He warned me. ‘Can’t you ask someone you know to put you up? Even the best Turks will rob you if they can. And as for the Armenians . . .’ In the Turkish capital Armenians were regarded much as Jews were in Odessa. A little sun now filtered through the fog. Bragg looked up like a hound catching the wind. ‘Ah!’ He peered forward, then pointed with his pipe. Both the Baroness and myself turned to look. The fog was pouring back now, like a stage curtain, and the ship emerged suddenly into clearer water. I saw a dim grey strip that was a shoreline with what seemed rather ordinary square buildings, a stand or two of trees; certainly nothing of the spectacle I had been promised.

  ‘Constantinople seems rather drab.’ The Baroness uttered a nervous laugh. ‘Like everywhere else, I suppose. The reality’s always disappointing.’ A few distant horns sounded from hidden ships. A caique with a triangular sail went by to starboard, leaning hard into the freshening breeze. I began to hear many more small, mysterious noises, as if of vigorous activity just out of sight The ship took a turn or two to port. Then the rest of the fog broke away from our bow to stream like torn clothing off the rigging. We were immediately in open sea. Ahead the coast became more sharply defined. On the water’s edge I distinguished large buildings apparently rising directly out of the sea. They seemed to be made of a greyish limestone. A light drizzle fell from clouds like discoloured pearl. Tugs, two or three small steamers, a sternwheel paddle-boat, a scattering of sailing vessels moved busily in the distance. The shipping seemed to span the entire millennium. On my right lay the European shore, on my left the Asian. I glanced from one to the other. I had expected far too much, it seemed, but the mist was heavy on both coasts. We passed little clusters of white houses and flimsy trees, tiny wharves against which single-masted fishing caiques were tied, where dark-faced men in shirt-sleeves rolled barrels, shifted bales and mended nets, like waterfront workers the world over. Most of these, however, wore the red tarboosh of Islam. Still more ships began to crowd around us, rushing this way and that across the water, puffing, creaking, hooting, apparently without any predetermined direction. The caiques sped crazily back and forth like dodgems at a fairground. I felt a sense of excitement at the ordinary commercial bustle around us. It had none of the hushed, nervous, doom-laden quality of recent Russian ports. Yet still I was disappointed. Constantinople was an ordinary, busy seaport, larger than Odessa had been before the War, but not much different. Still, it was cheering to see so much ordinary activity and not have to listen to gunfire.

  The Rio Cruz slowed to quarter
-speed, slipping gradually to starboard, urgently sounding her siren as she was narrowly missed by a side-paddle steamer full of impassive Levantines which drove directly across her bow. Thirty swarthy heads turned without much interest to watch us: a collection of greasy turbans, fezzes, bur-nooses and cloth-caps. The paddle-boat was painted bright streaky red. She carried a silver Islamic crescent on her smoke-stained funnel and clattered like a sewing-machine as she made her painful way towards the Asian shore while our own ship grumbled, an ill-tempered old lady discommoded by rowdies.